Black Ops II crosses $1 billion sales mark

Black Ops II has been a huge success for Activision. The game has now crossed the $1 billion mark worldwide in just fifteen days. Comparatively, Modern Warfare 3 took sixteen days to hit the $1 billion mark.

Just a day after its release, Black Ops II had crossed the $500 million mark. For the sake of comparison, one of the biggest games for the Xbox 360, the recently released Halo 4, saw about $220 million in sales on its first day. However, this could be attributed to the fact that Halo 4 is an Xbox 360 exclusive release, whereas Black Ops II was released for all gaming platforms.

The future isn't black financially

This is par for the course when it comes to sales of games in the Call of Duty franchise. In 2011, Activision had reported $400 million worth of sales for the last year's Call of Duty game – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The Call of Duty series has always seen record breaking sales since the release of Modern Warfare 2 back in 2009.

Activision had released an update for the game last month that fixed a number of bugs and allowed the FOV to be increased by up to 90 degrees. Other fixes in the patch include a fix for the horse falling through the world in Afghanistan when playing on CPUs with 4 or more cores and a fix for cases of 'Connection Interrupted' in multiplayer while loading into a match.

FOVs are generally locked because of the hardware limitations of gaming consoles, as the consoles have problems streaming high-resolution textures in a game. With the FOV locked, less in-game area is visible and hence, less in-game area needs to be streamed. Games on the PC don’t generally have the same problem as the hardware on gaming PCs is leagues ahead in terms of power than that on gaming consoles.

This is a big deal when it comes to first person shooters because the FOV determines how much you can see in the first person view. While FPS games on consoles are usually capped at 60-65 degrees because of the hardware limitations of the systems, this isn’t a problem because players are generally far enough away from the screen for the FOV to be right. When playing a PC game, players are generally much closer to the screen and require an increased FOV to avoid feeling nauseous due to tunnel vision.

Back in 2009, when Activision had released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the company faced a lot of complaints from players for locking the FOV of the game to 60 and removing the capability of playing on dedicated servers. This forced PC gamers to play on peer-based games, which caused high amounts of problems if the host of the game was on a slow connection.