Battlefield 3 Sells 5 Million Copies In Week One, Breaks EA Record

Battlefield 3, the latest from EA's military shooter game franchise, launched last week and has since sold a record 5 million copies worldwide, generating more than $300 million in estimated revenue. It has become EA's fastest selling title in the the company's 29-year history, outselling the combined week one sales of all previous 17 Battlefield games.

The huge success for EA was partly backed by a smooth marketing campaign with a trickling of gameplay footage leading up to E3 2011 and plenty of word-of-mouth and positive critic's reviews. The game received 2.5 million "Likes" on Facebook with over 200,000 followers on Twitter and gamers have already executed 73 million savior kills, 48 million revives and destroyed 67 million vehicles.

The game uses the Frostbite 2 game engine that creates massive fully destructible environments and also allows players to pilot all sorts of vehicles including jets, tanks, and choppers. The game also offers the Battlelog social network service to keep players connected. However, the popularity surpassed EA's expectations and the company's servers had intermittently gone down for some players over the last week, but stabilized to about 98.9% over the weekend.

Although stellar results for EA, its arch rival Activision has consistently won on the numbers with its Call of Duty franchise of games. The Call of Duty Black Ops sold more than $650 million worth of games in the first week when it launched last year and now Activision is getting ready to debut Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 on November 8. It'll be interesting to see how the numbers compare this time around.

[via VentureBeat]