Battlefield 3 Sells 5 Million Units in First Week

It’s not like there was ever any doubt, but Battlefield 3 sold well in its first week. Very well, in fact. How does 5 million units sound? With those sales, Battlefield 3 becomes the fastest-selling EA game in history, and with a total of over 10 million copies shipped, it’s on track to break the monthly record also.

According to the press release, much of the success that Battlefield 3 experienced was thanks not only to a robust marketing campaign (and let’s face it, EA and DICE made no mistake there), but also with word of mouth. How many forums have you seen with people linking to YouTube trailers for the games? Or friends sending you IMs or e-mails with the same links? The hype around the game up to its launch almost became infectious.

The press release covers other stats also. Over 2.5 million people “Liked” the game on Facebook, it has over 200,000 followers on Twitter (a bit more than ours), and in the first weekend, there were a total of 73 million savior kills, 48 million revives and 67 million destroyed vehicles.

Although there were some launch issues with people unable to get into a match easily, EA boasts the fact that there was 98.9% uptime throughout the weekend, which for a brand-new launch isn’t too bad at all. It’s a lot better than what I’ve seen from the past two Call of Duty launches, I can say that much.

Speaking of – it’s projected that Modern Warfare 3 is set to sell twice as many copies in its first week, so let’s see how that holds up when the game launches next week. Unfortunately, due to other things work-related, I haven’t been able to dedicate a ton of time to Battlefield 3, but that’s the goal this week. It’s time to master the art of benchmarking while gaming!