Treyarch has done better than Infinity Ward

The CEO of Activision’s parent company Vivendi has stated that in Call of Duty: Black Ops, Treyarch has made a better game than Infinity Ward ever has.

We have broken our own record. I am very, very pleased,” Jean-Bernard Lvy told investors at a Morgan Stanley conference this week, as reported by the Financial Times.

The Treyarch studio, which made this year’s game, has done better than what the Infinity Ward studio could achieve a year ago.”

In its first five days on the market, Black Ops sold $650m worth of stock worldwide, equating to an estimated 10m copies. In the same time frame in 2009, Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 sold $550m.

Lvy added that the future of the franchise, despite the turbulence of this year, is now set in stone.

We have reconstructed Infinity Ward,” he confirmed. We have been very happy with the way we have been able to reconstruct it. We also have a third studio which was created about a year-and-a-half ago called Sledgehammer, which is working on Call of Duty properties.

We believe this set up of studios working on Call of Duty has demonstrated it can do very well.”

Activision has been going out of its way recently to big the credentials of Treyarch. With the Infinity Ward of today no doubt very different to the Infinity Ward of 2009, it’s in the publisher’s interests to position the tried and tested Treyarch as the new lead of Call of Duty development.