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• Call of Duty: Black Ops shatters UK day-one sales record

  

  As we learned yesterday, the act of dude-shooting has worldwide appeal. In a follow-up, MCV reports that data provided by the UK's GfK Chart-Track service breaks down the particular explosiveness of Call of Duty: Black Ops' launch sales in the region, which set the day-one software sales record in the UK with 1.4 million units sold -- and, by deduction, indicates that an estimated 4.2 million copies of the game were sold in the US on Tuesday. UK purchases alone lined Activision's pockets with a heavy £58 million sum (about $93.5 million) in launch day revenue, a 22-percent increase over last year's UK launch of Modern Warfare 2.

   

  The reason for this massive increase? Activision chalks it up to a higher install base of PS3s and 360s in the region, as well as to the fact that, unlike MW2, there are Wii and DS versions of Black Ops (which certainly accounted for a few sales, right?). Those are pretty good guesses, but we think it's because everyone keeps colloquially shortening the title of the game to "Blops," which is an inherently British-sounding word. Example: "Fancy some Blops, guv?"