Activision announced sales of $325 million for the first week of Destiny, its new game. Over 5 million copies of the game are in circulation.
Destiny players also collectively logged over 100 million hours playing the game, participating in 137 million activities.
"Destiny fans played more than 100 million hours of the game in the first week. That's on par with the engagement levels of our most popular Call of Duty games, which obviously is an industry leader," said Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg in a statement. "Millions of gamers are having a great time playing Destiny and can't put down their controllers. And this is just the beginning. Destiny is a platform that will grow and evolve and we will continue to work closely with our partners at Bungie to bring a long line of new experiences and content to life in the game."
Destiny has been hailed as one of the first "true event" games of a new generation of games, casting players as the guardian of the last remaining city on Earth. Players explore the world laid out before them, including ancient ruins as well as other environments such as Mars and Venus.
Apart from the story campaign, users can also go up against each other or play in a cooperative mode.
Despite the large amount of money that the game has earned, there are conflicting reports as to whether the game is profitable or not. Some reports indicate that the game cost a total of $500 million to make and while Activision has denied that claim, the figure is sure to be high.
"The budget for Destiny, including associated marketing costs and pizza Wednesdays, is nowhere near 500 million dollars," said the company in a blog post.
Despite the game's success, it has received very mixed reviews, currently sitting at around 6/10 among users on Metacritic, a site that aggregates reviews.
"Destiny exists in the shadow of multiple games, taking a little from each, and doing nothing truly remarkable with any of it." said Jim Sterling, a game reviewer for The Escapist, an online gaming magazine. "It's a prime example of how the nebulous concept of 'content' can be used to puff up a game without adding anything to it. There's a ton of 'stuff' in Destiny. You'll never want for things to do ... but it's terrible at providing motivation to do any of it."
While the game may be getting mixed reviews, it would be impossible to say that the game is unsuccessful.
