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Call of Duty is the ‘best-selling franchise on PlayStation’… says Modern Warfare 2 Xbox case

The Canadian physical Xbox edition of Modern Warfare 2 makes some bold statements about Call of Duty's status on PlayStation, weirdly.

It's no secret that Call of Duty is one of the best-selling franchises of all time. The series, at the last official count, has sold well over 425 million units – meaning it's only really outpaced by the likes of Mario, Tetris and Pokemon in the great halls of all-time video game sales.

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When you have the likes of Infinity Ward, Gray Matter Studios, Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games, Raven Software, Neversoft, High Moon Studios, and Beenox and whoever else Activision sends to the CoD salt mines, though, that's fairly unsurprising, right? Releasing nearly one game per year for over a decade is a surefire way of racking up the sales.

But, despite knowing that the series is one of the best-selling game franchises across modern consoles, players are having a laugh at Activision's expense this week as a misprint has been discovered on the Canadian version of the Modern Warfare 2 Xbox physical edition.

Per a post over on the r/XboxSeriesX subreddit, the Canadian physical edition of the latest Call of Duty title has a mistranslation or printing error on the box that replaces 'Xbox' with 'PlayStation' on the back cover. As such, on the Xbox version of the game, the flavour text on the case reads: “best-selling franchise on PlayStation”. Oops!

It's true, of course – CoD is the best-selling franchise on PlayStation. It's just funny that the marketing message appears on the Xbox version of the game (especially when you consider the thorny position CoD has right now in the Activision/Microsoft takeover deal, and the doubts PlayStation has over how CoD will be handled post-merger).

Embedded below, you'll see a Twitter user that works in a Canadian store confirming the misprint.

Dodgy translations and physical editions aside, it looks like Modern Warfare 2 has been a hit for Activision; Modern Warfare 2 was Call of Duty's biggest-ever Steam launch, and it looks to be doing equally well on console, too. If you've picked the game up and want to know more about it, you can check out our campaign review or learn the fastest way to level up your weapons in our guide.

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Dom Peppiatt avatar

Dom Peppiatt

Editor-in-chief

Dom is a veteran video games critic with 11 years' experience in the games industry. A published author and consultant that has written for NME, Red Bull, Samsung, Xsolla, Daily Star, GamesRadar, Tech Radar, and many more. They also have a column about games and music at The Guardian.

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