Here’s an interesting blip on the Xbox 360 radar. The most recent online play rankings for Xbox Live put Battlefield 3 behind not one, but two Call of Duty games: Black Ops and 2009′s Modern Warfare 2. Electronic Arts threw a lot of words around about Battlefield‘s dominance in the months leading up to the DICE shooter’s release and even though the game has sold 5 million copies and currently leads 2011 in sales, it is now chowing down on some well-deserve humble pie.
There are a few factors working against the EA game here. For one, Battlefield 3 has been fraught with online play issues since it launched, particularly on the Xbox Live front. What’s more, it was recently revealed that Duty players could look forward to in-game rewards in next week’s Modern Warfare 3 for each previous game in the series that they’d gone Prestige (ie maxed out and reset their multiplayer progression progress) in.
The rankings are really just further proof that Battlefield 3 has suffered from a rocky launch. The multiplayer will probably gel once DICE gets a few more updates out the door and the server issues are worked out. I don’t think anyone ever really expected Battlefield to completely dominate the Xbox Live rankings, but it’s a little surprising to see it falling behind a pair of one- and two-year-old games.
