Has playing a Call of Duty game ever entered your mind as of late? I sure don't recall for the past 17-18 months. I think about 50 million players have thought the same and realized why continue with this charade of playing a game that is close to a rotting corpse now? A shell of its former glory? The last 2 Call of Duty games, both Vanguard and Black Ops Cold War, have been underwhelming entries after the Modern Warfare reboot.
50 million is 1/3 of the overall active player population of their F2P game, Warzone. That has to be a significant drop, but why now is it being reported from all this time? Is it because of the ongoing litigation against Activision Blizzard? Not quite, I don't think most CoD players would care about that.
No, the data behind it and most of the vocal majority have made several lists of complaints regarding the game's state currently, and how it has failed to entice anyone to continue playing, especially when there are already better games to play. This even includes their mobile gaming entries.
Stiff Competition
I could talk about other games like Modern Combat 5: Blackout, PUBG Mobile, or the upcoming Apex Legends for mobile, but no, since mobile gaming happens to be the big draw out for high player counts, I am going to talk about Fortnite.
Because the one type that most people on their phone plays right now is Battle Royale. PUBG pioneered it, Fortnite popularized, Call of Duty Mobile just joined the trend. And now, the early trend setters are taking their spots back.
I really don't want to talk about mobile games, since that subject matter is the one that would induce nausea, and vomiting. But there's a lot of data to look, one in particular is how CoD Mobile is nowhere near the same game as the Call of Duty games on major platforms. Warzone has a ridiculous high player count, which used to be triple the numbers from Mobile. Mobile now is losing over players as each month passes. At Jan 2021, it was going over 4 million players per month. A year later, it lost over 500K players.
Warzone has also been losing players since January, this year. Twitch viewer numbers have also been plummeting, indicating that people have reached fatigue with the game. A big number of issues, factoring the game's content updates, balancing, technical aspects, among others. The community side that has been highly vocal about these factors had a lot to say.
When you're already in a saturated market full of games that are one-upping you, how do you stay in the industry out of just namesake? With the terrible release of Call of Duty:Vanguard, and the community managers' overall ambivalence towards their player base, why should anyone stay?
Poor Feedback Loop
Ah yes, this bit. Remember customer satisfaction? The one thing they omit from their earnings reports? Well, this is the segment I believe will poignantly explain why people are really turned off from playing CoD any longer.
The biggest problems that have consistently plagued this franchise are terrible spawn points, camping, hackers, stream sniping, bad map and level design, lack of originality, terrible monetization schemes, server problems, a much myriad list of issues that have span across every single Call of Duty game right after Ghosts and Advanced Warfare. Right from 2014.
The Modern Warfare reboot was a breath of fresh air, something that Infinity Ward needed to bring their studio back from near closure. A new direction, new engine, new refinements and changes to the formula that everybody else was familiar, it was a much grounded boots on the ground FPS. Then the other series started copying the exact feel and design, and it started to get tedious, this was after two more games from the reboot.
I guess when you release a F2P game that is based on your most recent successful game, and it catapulted your company's bottom line, you would be sloppy enough to not care about anything else later on. Of course, the loss of 50 million is a start, it indicates they're back to where they were at 2020, it's launch year.
All the above-mentioned in the first para, applies to every new content drop per new game release with Warzone. Players have also been reporting terrible new weapon balancing, bad visual bugs and glitches, these have been coming in droves. With a new season 2 coming in the way, maybe they could have a chance to fix this. Especially since Microsoft is now buying the big publisher.
So the TL;DR of this whole thing is; players are tired of publisher not treating their games right, there's competition out there that are doing better, community feedback is terrible, and new season update for Warzone comes with various problems. All of this resulting in players leaving the game.
Do not get me wrong though, I think with Microsoft, they should be in better hands. But that will take time till the acquisition is fully completed. For now, seems clear as day that Call of Duty franchise and the respective studio developing for it has a lot of work in order to regain player's trust again.