The latest addition to the Call of Duty series, the much vaunted Modern Warfare 2, has gone above and beyond, breaking not just gaming records set by Grand Theft Auto 4, but outperforming record breaking movies.

Word comes from the AFP that Modern Warfare 2 hasn’t just broken records when it comes to videogame sales, topping Grand Theft Auto’s first week sales (which hit the princely sum of $500 million) by something to the tune of 10% higher, but that it’s also outperforming movie records. The comparison offered is between the latest Harry Potter film and Modern warfare; Harry Potter took in $394 million in its open week, which pales in comparison to Modern Warfare 2’s $550 million.

This puts us in the entirely unusual position where people essentially have to acknowledge the point that’s been made by hardcore gamers for years; it seems that videogames are becoming something of a genuinely acceptable alternative to other media, which is intriguing.

Of course, the report goes on to point out that, in general, the games industry has been making less money this year than last, but that news doesn’t carry quite the same weight when you’re looking at sales figures that indicate that games have the potential to be a more successful business than movies.

It’s also interesting to see that Modern Warfare 2 has managed to pull this out of the bag in spite of some fairly broad complaints on the part of PC gamers, who see its lack of dedicated servers as a bit of an affront, given that it’s very much been the spirit of the platform for more than a decade… still, anyone with a reasonable sized Steam friends list will have seen just how far those complaints got people.

It’s all well and good to protest something, but likely Activision can’t hear anyone over the ringing of tills.