Modern Warfare II’s dominance is evident by the number of Xbox Call of Duty Xbox players

Activision is celebrating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II’s record-breaking launch. We thought it would interest us to compare Xbox player counts at launch to other games in the series.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, which was released less two weeks ago, made more than a billion dollars and became the most successful Call of Duty launch in history in just ten short days. You might be wondering how much. We wanted to know that too so we ran the numbers. The same data that fuels our weekly Xbox Gameplay Chart is used here. More than 25% of Xbox account holders played Modern Warfare II within its first full week — a series high that puts last year’s Vanguard to shame.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II was played by 25% of Xbox account holders in the first week, data show.

TrueAchievements compiles data from more than two million Xbox accounts each week to create a chart showing the most played Xbox games. With this solid sample, we can compare player activity across different releases and times. We have seen four major Call of Duty releases since we began collecting this data in late 2018. While the actual number of active accounts fluctuates each week due to fluctuations in the weekly total, we can take the first full week player counts and convert them into a percentage of our active total. This should give us an accurate representation of the popularity of those four Call of Duty titles.

As mentioned above, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II does indeed come out on top, with more than 25% of scanned players jumping into the new game last week — miles ahead of second-place game Fortnite, which was only played by 14%. The predecessor of the new title, 2019,’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare is close behind. Although the data for this one is from the early days on our Xbox Gameplay Chart, when sample sizes were smaller, we can still extrapolate to show that Modern Warfare was visited by 23% of users in week 1. It had a fantastic opening week but was still outranked by Fortnite in its prime which appeared on more than 26% of accounts.

S, which gave early adopters another major-name title to enjoy on their new consoles.|S to give early adopters another big-name title to play on their new hardware. According to our data 20% of Xbox gamers got involved in Cold War during the first week. This title, however, failed to make the top 10 on that week’s chart. It was actually narrowly beaten by one of its own — Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (23%) was still flying high a year after launch thanks to the ongoing popularity of Warzone (which made it into our best free Xbox games round-up). We finally reach Call of Duty: Vanguard. These impressive numbers for other Call of Duty launches just highlight how poor Vanguard performed in comparison. It was able to capture just 10% of Xbox gamers in week one. However, it failed to break our top five chart for that week. In the following weeks, it never outperformed the evergreen Modern Warfare.

Modern Warfare II’s record-breaking launch is only possible because of this pattern. As New Call of Duty games seemed to be on a downward trend, players continued to stick with Modern Warfare/Warzone starting in 2019, and the steep drop-off with Vanguard did not paint a positive picture of the future of one of most beloved gaming franchises on Earth. Modern Warfare II looks like it has made a significant change. While the close comparison of Modern Warfare II’s predecessor suggests that increased revenues from recent games were a factor, you can’t take away anything from a game that makes $1 billion per week. Call of Duty won’t be going away anytime soon.

Are you impressed with the Call of Duty this year? Surprised at how badly Vanguard failed? Please share your thoughts with us below!