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The infographic lovers at visual.ly have turned their attention to the current debate raging among gamers: which is better, Call of Duty or Battlefield?
The infographic is a vertical timeline, along which Battlefield releases are on the left and CoD games are on the right. For each game there are the systems it released for, the developer, the Metacritic rating, and a bubble whose size represents total sales (check out the full-size version at the end of this post).
The Battlefield series came first, with Battlefield 1942 releasing exclusively on PC in 2002. Call of Duty made its original entrance a year later, also just for PC. There wasn’t such a rivalry between these two series’ fans as there is now, but the games themselves competed closely. The originalCoD scored a 91 on Metacritic, a ratings aggregator, and Battlefield landed an 89.
Moving into the Modern Warfare era, it’s plain to see that one franchise is simply bigger than the other. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare sold a staggering 18 million copies. The nextBattlefield release, Bad Company, did a mere 2.5 million (which is still a big hit, mind you).
2010 is the last year where the infographic has complete data – after all, Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 did release just last week. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was a respectable release, with an 88 on Metacritic and 6.5 million copies sold. Black Ops, on the other hand, lost by one point in the Metacritic contest with an 87, but sold a truly ludicrous 28 million copies.
Interestingly, those last two games released collectively on the PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, Nintendo DS, and iOS. That’s a very different device mix from two humble PC shooters that will celebrate their 10-year anniversaries before long.
via visual.ly
Blake’s Opinion
Oddly, visual.ly left out the really interesting numbers: the cumulative ones across the whole series!
I took the Metacritic scores reported here to find what is, as objectively as possible, thebetter series. The results were amazing. Across 8 or 9 years and 14 or 15 games, depending on the series, Battlefield won by a hair, with an average Metacritic of 83.3 just edging out CoD‘s 82.3.
On the popularity barometer, though, things are very different. You don’t have to add up the numbers to know that Activision’s shooter has blown EA’s out of the water. Just look at those circles on the infographic!
Lastly, there’s a vast difference between the developers who worked on the two series. Call of Duty has had 8 different studios work on its various releases, and even the top-tier releases alone have had three (Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and now Sledgehammer). Battlefield? Just one: DICE.
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