Call of Duty Crosses $40 Billion — and Modern Warfare 4 Is Its Best-Reviewed Game in 15 Years

Call of Duty has now made more than $40 billion in lifetime revenue. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced the milestone in a post on X on Monday, October 26, three days after Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launched worldwide.

“One of the most celebrated Call of Duty games in its 24-year history, and now $40B in lifetime franchise revenue,” Sharma wrote, sharing a graphic of Modern Warfare 4’s review scores. “An incredible milestone. Congrats to the Activision team. And to the players, thank you for being with us.”

The $40 billion belongs to the whole franchise — every mainline release, Warzone, and mobile title since the series debuted in 2003 — not to Modern Warfare 4 alone. Sharma offered no breakdown of the figure and did not say how much the new game contributed, or exactly when the series crossed the line. The last confirmed checkpoint came in 2022, when the franchise stood at $30 billion in lifetime revenue. Four years on, it has added another $10 billion.

The game that carried the announcement

Modern Warfare 4, developed by Infinity Ward, launched October 23 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2 — the first Call of Duty ever to launch on a Nintendo console day one. Digital pre-orders opened the campaign a week early, on October 16. The package pairs the campaign — the finale of the rebooted Modern Warfare saga, built around a North Korean invasion of the Korean Peninsula — with competitive multiplayer and the returning DMZ extraction mode.

Critics have treated it as a genuine return to form. The official Call of Duty account highlighted Metacritic scores of 89 on PlayStation 5 and 86 on PC. That PC score makes Modern Warfare 4 the highest-rated Call of Duty in 15 years: no entry in the series has scored higher since Modern Warfare 3 posted an 88 in 2011. The contrast with recent years is stark — last year’s Black Ops 7 scored a 65, and 2023’s Modern Warfare III managed just a 56. OpenCritic has the game at 85, and its campaign earned the series’ best Steam user rating in over a decade.

It is not the first time Sharma has reached for a Hollywood-sized comparison. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in June, she said Call of Duty was bigger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe — a claim made while discussing screen adaptations of Xbox properties. At $40 billion in lifetime revenue, the franchise she oversees now has the receipts to make that argument.

What the milestone doesn’t say

Worth noting what Monday’s announcement left out. As Kotaku pointed out, Activision has published no sales figures, unit numbers, or launch-weekend totals for Modern Warfare 4 itself — a quieter posture than the victory laps the company used to take after launch weekends, when it would compare opening sales to Hollywood box office. This is also the first Call of Duty launch in years to arrive without a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass, after Microsoft ended the practice of putting new entries on the service at launch.

So the $40 billion is best read for what it is: a lifetime achievement number for the biggest shooter franchise in the business, announced at the moment its newest game gave it something it hasn’t had in a decade and a half — reviews to brag about in the same breath.

The Games Desk’s read: Call of Duty made most of that $40 billion in years when the reviews didn’t matter — it sold through a 56 and a 65 without blinking. What changed this week isn’t the money. It’s that Infinity Ward finally shipped a Call of Duty the critics can stand next to the revenue: an 86 on PC, the series’ best in 15 years, next to a $40 billion total that no other shooter franchise is close to touching. The machine was never broken. Now the games are good again too.

— The Games Desk, Previously