Check out any of the NPD/sales threads; month to month MW3 is down compared to Black Ops, the series sales are becoming more and more front-loaded. Unless some sort of miracle happens Black Ops will absolutely outperform MW3 in lifetime sales by probably at least 2-3 million copies which seems like a shitload, until you consider that I think Black Ops is at something like 21 million LTD? So obviously if MW3 does say 17 million that's obviously still great, but it's still a downward trend, especially when you look at Black Ops being #2 on XBL right behind MW3 (and with MW2 still in the top 10 I believe). It's very slowly trending downward and the playerbase is fragmenting. Like I referenced there have been Activision conference calls where they've mentioned the Bungie IP basically coming in to relieve CoD if that starts to decline YOY like Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk did, etc. MW3 was definitely the tipping point where most of my friends were done with it after a month or two, and we all played MW2 and Blops for a full year until the next release, Activision would be smart to try to get out ahead of that happening rather than running it into the ground until it's long dead like GH/TH, etc.
