No one in their right mind is going to argue if Counter-Strike still holds relevancy in the shooter market today as just about every single competitive FPS fan to date has been weened off of the classic shooter. In fact, CS is arguably the reason that any sort of competitive FPS scene exists today, there's really just no fighting the fact that many of the liberties we enjoy today from iconic modern gaming weaponry to level design all stem from the good old fashioned Counter-Strike.

Call of Duty's numbers are unholy. It sold over two million copies of Modern Warfare in month one, more than five and a half million Black Ops on day one. It's the billion dollar franchise - literally - with a stranglehold on the entire shooter genre.

Activision is planning to launch subscription service alongside Modern Warfare 3; will feature extra maps, free Facebook-like social network; beta begins this summer; first trailer inside.

Since it launched in November of last year Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has achieved the staggering milestone of making over one billion dollars at retail, worldwide. Activision sent out a press release stating that its own internal estimations clock in at this massive number.

It may not come as a surprise to read that Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is now officially 2009's most pirated game. What is a surprise however is the sheer number of illegal downloads that the game's suffered. According to news read over on DownloadSquad, the PC version of the outrageously popular shooter has been grabbed over 4.1 million times since it launched six weeks ago. To put this into perspective, back in the early days of BitTorrent, a large games group shifted 300,000 copies of Doom 3 during its opening weekend. TorrentFreak go as far to say that download figures in 2009 are double those of 2008 -- mirroring the growth of uTorrent (which now has 52 million users!)