Call Of Duty has lost 50 million players in just one year
There are now one third less people playing Call Of Duty than there were in 2021, as the problems with Vanguard and Warzone begin to bite.
Nothing lasts forever, and while Call Of Duty has been the West’s favourite video game for over a decade last year’s Vanguard is the point at which the crown slipped. Although it’s only now that we get a true indication of just how badly it performed.
Vanguard was already the lowest selling entry since 2007’s Call Of Duty 4 but Activision Blizzard’s latest financial results reveal that while Activision had 150 million monthly active users in the first three months of 2021 that’s dropped to 100 million for the first three months of 2022.
That’s for Activision as whole, not including Blizzard, but since they don’t publish anything with monthly active users other than Call Of Duty games the figures can be attributed solely to paid-for entries like Vanguard, the free-to-play Warzone, and Call Of Duty: Mobile.
To be clear, 100 million is still a huge amount, and much more than almost any other franchise (despite its failings Vanguard was still the best-selling game in the US in 2021) but the audience dropping by a third in just 12 months is clearly not healthy.
Some of the decline can be blamed on the pandemic but Activision itself admits that Vanguard underperformed, that Call Of Duty: Mobile performance has been ‘flat’, and that Warzone is suffering from ‘lower engagement’.
Warzone’s problems are attributed to the switch to a Second World War setting, to match Vanguard, and ongoing problems with cheaters and bugs.
That’s why Warzone 2 is already in development and expected to be released this year, alongside the more anticipated, compared to Vanguard, Modern Warfare 2.
For Activision Blizzard as
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