Alongside the release of Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 there’s a war of numbers breaking out. Analysts are trying to be the first to pin down a sales estimate, a number that has so far varied by several million units. At first it was Ben Schachter claiming 7 million for day one. Michael Pachter thinks Ben’s crazy, and estimates just 4 million copies for the first day. I’m inclined to trust Pachter, since even he puts things over the top at times.

Whatever the real number, it has a lot of zeroes, and that’s got to make Activision pretty happy. Most analysts still think the 12 million unit estimate for the quarter through December is conservative. That puts total sales by year end somewhere around $700 million, which is just obscene. By comparison, Halo 3 just made it through 8 million units in its first 3 months. As a throwback, Joystiq also mentioned that Street Fighter II, which literally everyone I knew owned, sold 6.3 million units total worldwide.

Hopefully the end of the quarter will bring some hard and fast numbers for us. Until then, go throw some knives at some people. It’s insanely fun.