The Escapist Bulletin: Why it’s bad that Modern Warfare 2 is so good

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released this week, and to absolutely no one’s surprise it smashed sales records all over the world, selling over a million copies in the UK alone on its first day. So what does this mean for gaming?

Well, George Carlin once said that if you vote you have no right to complain if the leader you helped pick, one way or the other, turns out to be a rotten apple. That might not seem like it has a lot to do with gaming, but let's put it another way: gamers lost the right to complain about sequels this week when they went out in their millions to buy the sixth Call of Duty game.

Don’t like first-person shooters or terrorists of ambiguous nationalities? Well that’s unfortunate, because it’s likely you’re going to be seeing an awful lot of both. Why? Because publishers know we like that sort of thing.

When it comes to games, we cast our votes with our purchases, and we’ve sent a very clear signal to Activision and all the other publishers about what it is we want in a game. We like shooters, we like terrorists, and - most importantly - we like sequels.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course, and it’s one that Activision, the current heavyweight sequel champion of the world, has built an entire business model around, but it speaks of a certainly naivety when gamers complain that the there are no new ideas in gaming when sales of sequels remain so high.

Not only have we shown Activision that its anti-creativity stance is absolutely fine, but we’ve legitimised higher prices - especially in the UK - and the removal of features. Good luck finding dedicated servers in any PC game ever in the future, for example - we’ve made it quite clear that we don’t care.

Of course, it’s disingenuous to claim that the only reason Modern Warfare 2 has sold well is because it’s a sequel. Its predecessor was a very good game and that is a major contributing factor, and to Infinity Ward’s credit it hasn’t set the game in some non-specific middle eastern country.

In fact, the general consensus is that Modern Warfare 2 is a very good game indeed, but is it good enough to be the best selling game of all time? Sales figures would suggest that it is.

Gamers, and especially hardcore ones, seem to conveniently forget that gaming is an industry just like any other, and that publishers will put out what their sales sheets tell them people want to buy, so the almost inevitable glut of modern day shooters in the immediate future is a direct result of the gaming public being utterly besotted with Call of Duty.

Not that there’s any harm in enjoying a sequel. Sequels give developers a chance to innovate without having to revolutionise, but given the utterly overwhelming response to Modern Warfare 2, what incentive do developers and publishers have to ever investigate new intellectual properties?

When games like Modern Warfare 2, Grand Theft Auto IV or Gears of War 2 sell by the bucket load, what reason does the industry have to set aside winning formulae and get inventive?

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