Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 enjoyed strong sales during its launch week, topping the UK boxed chart and seizing the title of the best-selling game on Steam. Its early commercial success arrived in spite of a poor critical reception that saw Modern Warfare 3 become the worst-rated game in Call of Duty history.

The series' first-ever back-to-back sequel was largely panned for its extremely short and uninspired single-player campaign, with reviewers also criticizing Modern Warfare 3 for some recycled content. A vocal subset of the fandom has also lambasted the game for those and other reasons, as underlined by the fact that its Metacritic user score currently stands at 1.7 out of 10, while its early Steam reviews are in the "Mostly Negative" category.

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Yet Modern Warfare 3 still debuted at the top of the UK boxed chart for the week ending November 11, GamesIndustry.biz reports, citing the latest GfK data. Sledgehammer's title hence displaced last week's number one, Super Mario Bros Wonder, and ended up outselling heavy-hitters such as EA Sports FC 24 and Marvel's Spider-Man 2. The PS5 port of Modern Warfare 3 accounted for 72% of its physical sales in the UK, while the Xbox and PS4 versions were credited for 20 and 8 percentage points, respectively.

GfK's Top 10 Best-Selling Physical Games in the UK for the Week Ending November 11

Since GfK doesn't estimate digital sales, the current picture of the game's commercial performance in the UK is incomplete. But that's not to imply that Modern Warfare 3 might not have done well digitally; on the contrary, the latest Call of Duty game has been listed as the best-selling title on Steam since before its global release. That launch happened on November 10 following a brief campaign early access period, which makes the fact that Modern Warfare 3 managed to top GfK's UK boxed chart for the week ending a day later all the more impressive.

MW3 Week-One Boxed Sales in the UK Are 25% Down Compared to MW2

Nevertheless, its week-one physical sales in the UK have still been 25% lower compared to last year's Modern Warfare 2, as per the same source. Whether that drop signals an overall decline in the series' annual performance or is merely proportional to the well-documented rate at which digital game sales have been replacing their physical counterparts in recent years remains to be seen.

The commercial success of the newly released shooter will likely decide whether Activision ends up rethinking its overall approach to the Call of Duty series by perhaps giving its developers a bit more breathing room between entries, much like some critics and fans have been calling for. In the meantime, both the publisher and Sledgehammer Games have denied the claim that Modern Warfare 3 was rushed after Bloomberg reported that the game was developed in only 16 months, which is an astonishingly short time frame for a modern AAA title.

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023)

Released in November of 2023, Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) continues Captain Price's story from the 2019 and 2022 games.

Franchise

Call of Duty , Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

Platform(s)

PC , PS5 , Xbox Series X , Xbox Series S , PS4 , Xbox One

Released

November 10, 2023

Developer(s)

Sledgehammer Games

Publisher(s)

Activision

Genre(s)

First-Person Shooter

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Use of Drugs

How Long To Beat

5 Hours

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