Activision: Over 20 Million Black Ops Players Log More Than 600 Million Hours

Over 20 million Call of Duty: Black Ops players have logged more than 600 million man-hours with the game in the 45 days since its November 9 release, Activision has revealed. The amount of play time, the equivalent of over 68,000 man-years spent with the game, amounts to an average of 87 minutes per day for each player through December 24, exceeding the average daily usage time for popular social network Facebook, as Activision points out. For comparison, Microsoft's Halo Reach attracted over 50 million man-hours of play in its first week of availability in September, which would track to roughly 326 million man-hours if the rate continued over 45 days. While Activision didn't reveal the precise number of online players for Black Ops, it did say that the number of registered users "exceeds the audience for the series finale of ABC's Lost" (which Nielsen places at 20.5 million people) and that those users "would be the third largest state in the U.S." (placing them behind Texas' roughly 25 million people). NPD results for November showed the game selling 8.4 million copies in North America during its launch month. The statistics announcement comes just a week after Activision revealed the game had garnered over $1 billion in sales. "The $1 billion milestone is staggering, but it doesn't tell the whole story," said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. "The true measure of Black Ops' success lies in the millions of hours that people are investing in this game and this community. Call of Duty has in many ways become one of the world's most engaged social networks." "Media is evolving and today the social aspects of technology are more important to the overall entertainment experience than ever before," said Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard. "Call of Duty creates a shared sense of identify for its community and is as integral to their social lives as any other form of digital communication."