Frankly, I think the COD dominance will see its first true challenger (MOH was a halfhearted attempt, if we're being honest with ourselves) with Battlefield 3. I remember COD2 really sowing the seeds for COD as a franchise to really explode with Modern Warfare (which launched just two months after the juggernaut that was Halo 3) - a solid experience, whose longevity was solidified by COD3 (a game made by a different team, and ultimatley sold well... but nothing near post-Modern Warfare numbers... the BF parallel would be the MoH reboot). Assuming the market doesn't outright collapse from so many huge big-budget military shooters in one month, I think Battlefield 3 will really start eating into that COD mass audience. BC2 really, I think, did what COD 2 did for their respective franchises. Both franchises have their die hard PC base... it just came down to reaching critical mass on consoles, and both BC2 and COD2 really laid the groundwork for that. Either way, I wouldn't expect COD to ever reach numbers it hit with BLOPS (which is obviously something that everyone seems to say every year, and never actually happens). At the very least, we see a decline in COD sales because of increased head-to-head competition. Potentially, we see a shift towards the Battlefield franchise this November that COD never really recovers from (a la the Halo -> COD shift in 2007)... which would really come at a bad time for Activision, who is trying to milk it for all it's worth.
Kind of like how Activision's milking of Guitar Hero came in the wake of declining sales... and ended up killing that franchise for good.
Maybe I'm riding the BF3 hype train a bit too much, but that's just my two cents. EA's positioning of BF3 against COD8 speaks to volumes about their hopes, at the very least.
