If you follow the war between EA and Activision you very well know that it all boils down to two games, Battlefield 3 VS Modern Warfare 3.  MW3 is without a doubt a highly successful game and franchise, bringing with it record sales year over year.  EA has never really been able to steal any of that thunder away, at least as much as they would like to.  With the Internet forum posting junkies up in arms over how much MW3 feels like MW2.5, can it be true?  Did some MW3 folks do something about how much they disliked the game?

Normally sales of EA and DICE’s Battlefield series slow to a crawl once a Call of Duty title is released.  The same was true in the days and weeks that followed the release of Activisions monster of a title Modern Warfare 3.  Since the first couple weeks of sales (and excluding a huge black friday) has MW3 sort of stalled?  I ask this, because as I start my review of BF3 I can see why fans of the series can finally say they have the better game.

I’m not going to outright turn this into a “which is a better” title, but we can let the numbers speak for themselves.  I put in the research time and here is what I discovered.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2, as it was titled, was released in March of 2010.  Initial sales were very well, in the 2 million range, but sales dropped and trickled in weeks and months after release.  In May of 2011, a little over a year after release, the series hit 7 million copies sold.  A great sales number by any means but not good enough for EA and DICE to dethrone the king of FPS games, the COD series.  Fast forward to July of 2011 and we learn from EA that 9 million units of BF2 have been sold.  Sounds great?  But again, the king of FPS games reached well over 20 million units in sales.

Lets head straight to the fall of 2011 with the release of both BF3 and MW3.  Sales of both started off very well, with BF3 reaching 5 million in sales in just the first week alone.  Yes, 5 million in sales, not just shipped to retailers.  This is a huge step for the series, one that brings them on a more level playing ground.  Sales slowed down once MW3 was released, as the behemoth brought in big sales.  Here is where it gets interesting.

Sales of MW3 in the UK are down almost 41% as of a few days ago.  In actuality it sounds a lot worse than it is, as sales this time of year pick up usually on weekends and not during the week, but we also took the time to ask around a few local gamestop’s and get their take on the BF3 VS MW3 war.  What we learned is MW3 hits the used bin almost 3 times more than BF3.  This means that while sales for MW3 are solid, and will remain that way (we absolutely do not see BF3 surpassing MW3 in sales), sales of BF3 are on the rise, as just this week EA decided to let us know that their monster game has now sold over 8 million copies with 12 million shipped.  They did this in 2 months where it took BF2 well over a year to hit the same sales figure.

It will be an interesting few months ahead but I absolutely believe that BF3 has given the COD series a slight run for their money.  The folks over at Activision laughed when BF2 took on COD.  This fall?  We think there is a lot more discussing at those board meetings rather than laughing.