Activision has claimed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is breaking engagement records, likely in a bid to combat the fact that Modern Warfare 3 is ranked as the worst Call of Duty game ever, holding a pretty miserable score of 58 on review aggregation site Opencritic.

“Just two weeks in, Modern Warfare 3 has already set records with the highest engagement in the new Modern Warfare trilogy,” reads a post by the Call of Duty account.

They go on to clarify what they mean, stating that Modern Warfare 3 players are apparently putting in more hours per person than the last two Modern Warfare games. However, it’s a rather vague thing to boast about since the numbers could be made up of a much smaller but more die-hard Call of Duty crowd. And as people in the comments have been pointing out, you also have to launch Modern Warfare 3 in order to play Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer which could easily be used to skew the numbers.

They also stated that Zombies is the  “the most engaging third mode in MW history”, and said campaign players have put in “more time per player in MWIII then the previous two instalments”. Again, somewhat vague claims that have little to no meaning when you think about them. Typically, metrics like engagement are used when talking about a game’s long-term performance, tracking whether players are sticking around or leaving.

It’s also interesting that Activision isn’t boasting about sales numbers and revenue, perhaps indicating that the latest Call of Duty, which is said to have been developed in a very short timeframe, isn’t doing the same numbers as its predecessors. Last year’s Modern Warfare 3 managed to bring in over $1 billion in just 10 day, according to Activision who were very quick to let the world know about how successful the game was.

However, even a poorly selling Call of Duty is likely shifting millions upon millions of copies. Hell, Modern Warfare 2 is one of the best-selling games of this year, despite coming out in 2022, and continues to pop in the charts.

Now that Call of Duty comes under Microsoft’s ownership, hopefully the annualised franchise can see its developers getting treated better and given more room to create new, awesome Call of Duty games.