Furthermore, neither game comes even close to being “the two most popular video game franchises in 2005.” America’s Army debuted in 2002, and has been modestly successful since then, but it’s not particularly popular. Its primary appeal is that it’s free to download (the game is fully subsidized as a recruiting tool by the US Army).

Full Spectrum Warrior was released in 2004, sold just over 1 million copies world wide, the bulk of which were in 2004. It’s sequel wasn’t released till 2006, which did not sell well (less than 50,000 copies), so FSW wasn’t a particularly successful videogame franchise either, in 2005 or 2006.

The actual best-selling videogame franchises can be found here:
Consoles: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6142407.html
PC: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=7832

As you can see, neither America’s Army nor Full Spectrum Warrior can be found on either of those lists. The PC game sales in 2005 had 2 war games in the top 10 (Battlefield 2, ranked 6th, and Call of Duty 2, ranked 10th), you’re welcome to criticize those games as signs of your ‘military–industrial–entertainment–media complex.’

But console games fared even better against this sort of criticism, with the only games with any violent content in the bestseller’s list being Star Wars games. I doubt swinging a lightsaber in ‘Lego Star Wars’ trains Americans to support the war. And given that console sales outstrip PC sales by 10 to 1 ($10.5 billion vs. $953 million), I think the nonviolent console videogame market is more indicative of the American videogame consumer habits.

If you’d like to criticize Full Spectrum Warrior and America’s Army anyway, go ahead, but know that they’re at best modestly successful videogames in an industry whose best-sellers are sports games, Pokemon, and Star Wars.

I’m going to hope that New Left Review’s fact checking on its other articles are of a slightly higher quality than in “War and the City,” else it probably shouldn’t be recommended to anyone.