Modern Warfare 2 Trade-ins Expected to be Low

November 23, 2009 - It's been close to two weeks since this holiday's most anticipated title, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, launched in just about every store across the globe. And despite its semi-short campaign length, it appears most players will be hanging onto the title until well into the New Year.

I spoke with GameStop VP of Marketing Tony Bartel a little while back about this, and he says Call of Duty titles are rarely seen back at the store until about two months after its release.

"Typically, we don't see a lot of people trading back in their new games right away," Bartel told IGN. "In fact, when you look at our used sales, at any given time, less than four percent of those used sales come from new games launched in the last 60 days."

"But what we've found historically with the Call of Duty franchise, that percentage is actually even smaller."

GameStop revealed last week the company sold 2.5 million copies of Modern Warfare 2 in the first three days of sales. I recently called ten random GameStop stores located in the biggest cities in the U.S. and none had any used copies in stock, even with the recent releases of Assassin's Creed II and Left 4 Dead 2.

Another reason players may be hesitant to trade in the title could be because they simply ran out of other titles to offer up instead, as GameStop says the company will receive a huge influx of pre-owned stock due to the demand for Modern Warfare 2.

"For Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, twenty percent of the product we sell will be funded in GameStop through credits from games people no longer play," Bartel added.

How long will Modern Warfare 2 be in your games library?