It’s no secret that Call of Duty is one of the most successful franchises of all time and Vanguard’s latest results are a perfect demonstration of that.. The analyst group NPD recently published the list of the best-selling PlayStation games of 2024 in the United States, taking into account both physical and digital releases. Note that if no figures are given, the organization bases its income on dollars.
The first place is thus occupied by Call of Duty Vanguard, the latest installment and released only in early November 2024. It will therefore have taken less than two months for the Activision hit to establish itself in the PlayStation fold, a sector which still has a staggering number of PS4 and PS5 in the territory of Uncle Sam.
On the second step of the American podium, we find Madden NFL 22, followed by a certain Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, testifying again and again to the public’s interest in the military saga. Here is the full ranking.
List of the best-selling PlayStation games in the USA in 2024
Obviously, it’s impossible not to draw a parallel with yesterday’s sensational announcement: Microsoft is about to buy Activision-Blizzard for almost 70 billion dollars. The operation will take a good year to complete and until then, the publisher will continue to publish its games independently: in other words, there is a chance that the next Call of Duty will still be available on PS4 and PS5 (by the way, it would be an open-world Modern Warfare 2: more info here).
On the other hand, as far as the future is concerned, it is clear that the future is… vague. Once Activision-Blizzard becomes part of the Microsoft fold, the latter will officially own many popular franchises such as Diablo, Crash Bandicoot but also, therefore, Call of Duty.
Many expect the franchise to be available directly in the Game Pass (and rightly so), but it is not yet known if Phil Spencer, the boss of the entire Xbox branch, will decide to make it a Microsoft exclusive like The Elder Scrolls VI or Starfield following the acquisition of Bethesda.
It would be a rather logical thing to encourage the purchase of Xbox Series, yes, but the park of PS4 and PS5 being strongly installed, it could be very profitable for Microsoft to sell Call of Duty on these precise machines: moreover , having an “Xbox Game Studios” logo when launching a Call of Duty on PlayStation and charging Sony to offer its franchise on the competing platform would be totally unprecedented. Suffice to say that the next few years promise to be very interesting in the video game landscape.
