People were going to buy this game simply because it's CALL OF DUTY, and Activision pulled out all the stops to promote it.
Most people don't know who the developer is, don't know and don't care that it's not Infinity Ward, not the same people behind Modern Warfare 1 & 2. Most people have never heard of Jason West and Vincent Zampella or Respawn Entertainment.
They just know that it's CALL OF DUTY, and it has cool guns and you shoot people and you level up online, you get cool stuff for killing lots of other people in a row, and that ALL THEIR FRIENDS are playing it.
Therefore, early sales were always going to be high, even if the game itself was mediocre. By most accounts the game is much better than mediocre, a credit to Treyarch.
The real question is, will Black Ops have sustained sales comparable to MW1 & 2? I don't know. My guess is that sustained sales will be very strong and similar to those of MW2, but that's just because again, most people are uninformed.
You can make a good argument that the game looks worse than Modern Warfare 2. The fact that this is even an issue is shameful. Black Ops should look better because Modern Warfare 2 is a year older. Mere parity would still be unacceptable.
The logical conclusion that many gamers would make is that "MW2 came out in 2009, BO came out in 2010, so BO should reflect an advancement in tech! Therefore, BO looks better!" Not true. IW did not share the tech it developed for MW2 with Treyarch. In fact,
Treyarch was using tools and tech from W@W. Explains a lot, doesn't it?
Most PS3 gamers will never know that their version is soundly inferior to the Xbox version, as opposed to MW2 where IW achieved near-parity, where the PS3 version actually handled shadows better than the 360 version. Most PS3 gamers will not notice that the graphics and framerate are worse than Modern Warfare 2 and arguably the game
looks worse than the year-older Modern Warfare 2. Most PS3 gamers will not care that only Xbox gamers get to play split-screen online with two XBL accounts, whereas PS3 gamers can only play split-screen online with one PSN account, the other one being a guest. Treyarch claims this is a built-in limitation of the PS3, even though the PS3 has been capable of logging in multiple PSN accounts to play online for over two years -- see Borderlands, LittleBigPlanet, and Resistance 2.
Will these issues cut down on PS3 sales over the long term? Maybe. I doubt it. Again, most PS3 gamers will never know about these problems.
Will PC gamers care that Treyarch botched the launch of the PC version, with the memory and CPU resource allocation causing severe framerate problems? PC gamers tend to be more sophisticated tech-wise then their console counterparts. After all, maintaining a gaming rig requires a higher level of knowledge about tech matters than it does to use a plug-and-play console. As long as Treyarch patches the problem in timely manner, I don't see this hurting long-term sales.
The single-player campaign is designed well and is about the same quality as the campaigns of MW1 and 2. Online multiplayer is robust, with plenty of game modes and compelling new options. In the end, that's what people want and what made people buy Modern Warfare 1 & 2, so I don't see sales dropping off sharply.
