I know numbers are usually boring, but given how much has been made about the competition between Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (mostly because of one company's chest pounding), there’s good reason to be paying attention.

Putting aside what anyone actually thought of Battlefield 3, Electronic Arts had ensured its latest shooter would do reasonably well, thanks to the game’s expansive, expensive and very loud marketing campaign. People also seem to really dig the game (at least the multiplayer), prompting about five million of them to pay for a copy, the publisher announced this afternoon.

These numbers are based on EA’s own “internal estimates,” and come not long after the company announced it had shipped 10 million copies of the game worldwide. Shipped and sold are crucially different, though that's not to say five million is anything to sneeze at.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 shipped on March 2010 and sold 2.3 million units right out of the gate. Based on numbers released a few months later, the game went on to sell more than five million units.

In today’s press release, EA said the Battlefield series has sold, in total, 50 million units.