In its first five days alone, the game sold more than $650 million worldwide, outpacing theatrical box office, book and video game sales records for five-day worldwide sell through in dollars, according to internal Activision estimates and boxofficemojo.com. The game exceeded Activision's previous five-day worldwide record of $550 million set by last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare® 2.

To date, more than 600 million hours have been logged playing Call of Duty: Black Ops since the game launched on November 9, 2010. According to Microsoft, the average player logs on more than once a day and plays for more than one hour each time. Over half of that time is spent playing online with and against friends, illustrating the unique social characteristics of the game.