'Terrible' Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 European Sales Are a Devastating 63% Below Battlefield 6

Double loss for MS. Paid all the cash for this just to have it fail spectacularly! But pardon me for not feeling bad for a billion-dollar company.

The big news from this table is Anno 117 on #2, above FC 26, Battlefield 6 and Pokemon. That’s an incredible success for such a niche of genre. And maybe it’s the bestselling game Made in Germany of all time.

How the mighty have fallen. They chased the money and look where it got them.

This is good for consumers. Maybe they'll actually put some effort in the next game. This is something that needs to happen for Pokemon too xD

@McBurn Not too sure why people have convinced themselves lower sales = more effort. Especially in this case, where Blops 7's problems really don't have much to do with polish or lack of funds.

The next entry will have more effort put into it. Not because of this ostensibly below expectations release, but rather due to Infinity Ward and/or Sledgehammer Games being given more than a year to put it together.

So, CoD is probably around 2.5-3m for its first week sales worldwide, unless it massively overperforms in the USA.

Nice to see Ghost of Yotei is not neglecting leg day.

even if call of duty as a franchise would fail i wouldn’t care about it at all

so i’m just wondering with articles like these if we the readers are supposed to feel bad about bad sales from a publisher who is worth billions where now they voluntarily decided to offer a bad product

why bother make a good game when they can expect people to buy it anyways, right?

Sadly, even if BLOPS 7 ended as a "flop", i bet it still sold millions of copies and lot more than creative / unique IP's like Kunitsu Gami, Tearaway, Hi-Fi Rush, Gravity Rush, Puppeteer, Haunting Ground etc that deserves to sell well...sigh 😔

@VanguardKaiser CoDs primary audience is on the PlayStation, though figures are hard to verify previous estimates have been as high as 82%. It's a disaster for MS to lose the Playstation audience as they actually have to pay for the game. The alleged lost $300m in GP sales last year and would have needed 15m new 1 month subscribers to cover the short fall. CoD's addition on attracting new subs was basically negligible.

@Elfuggingjefe

Notable by its absence around these parts.

I get that at least some people are going to play this on console, but this is 100% a PC game. You’re only playing it on console if you have no other choice.

@VanguardKaiser BO6 was on gamepass, but it might be the case that some of the more casual user base took some time to work this out.

However, the vast majority of CoD sales are on PlayStation anyway.

Let’s face it, Microsoft took a GIANT gamble & it is failing spectacularly. COD, Overwatch, Diablo, all on the down slide. Then they have WoW just sitting there & they double down on not bringing it to consoles. It defies logic on so many counts!

I don’t think one stumble dooms this franchise but it does demonstrate that too big to fail is not a thing in the commercial art industry. Games, movies, tv shows, books annd suchlike are luxuries and if fans either stop having fun or decide something else is more fun, sales fall off a cliff. In this case I believe the ‘something else’s’ were Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6.

Also while I am sure neither the campaign nor the ads are focal points of the CoD community there was an intense backlash to humorous celeb skins in the prior CoD so giving the new CoD humorous celeb filled ads and a really trippy campaign didn’t help.

I know chart placement isn't really important but still kinda crazy how it's being painted as a disaster and yet it's no.1 lol

Not really sure it even has to do with less effort. It seems like a lot went into trying to do something new with the basically all co-op campaign. Problem is it turned out like crap. Sometimes you fail doing something different.

Also think the MP is pretty good this year. But unfortunately for CoD, good isn’t good enough when Battlefield turned out as well as it did.

Having an absolute blast on Battlefield since launch, they’ve smashed it!

It’s the outcome of Xbox studios in my opinion, they spend a fortune but now need to recover losses. I can’t think of many new Xbox studio games that have not been lacking significantly. Atomfall, avowed, outer worlds 2.
I mean the campaign for black ops 7 is a joke with 4 maps and half the campaign is just some multiplayer PVE environment and it’s on the same map for a significant portion of the campaign.
L
I play a lot of gamepass to the extent my ps5 not been used since March. It’s a great service but Xbox studios AAA are more like A games they just seem so lacking for a current gen game.

CoD needs a 3 year break at minimum.

It does show that Branding is strong even with so much negativy COD still is at No1 the same goes for Pokemon that entry was also horrible.

@McBurn It shows that some gamers will eat a plate of ***** if you give it to them. Look at sports games of EA zero effort and people still buy it. Pokemon is terrible,with a day one €30 DLC with more to come.

Music to my ears. Activision is basically disrespecting all the gamers (even those that don't play COD like me) by lowering the standards to insulting levels so I'm happy it's failing.

That is great news, if you are gonna produce absolute garbage when making a game it does not deserve to be purchased.

Well done gamers and the Sony gang, speak with your wallets.

Microsoft messed up their own console, isn’t it coincidence with game cancellations this year and now a rubbish COD, they are now messing their game studios and their games.
Someone spotted the pattern, totally incompetent company.

This is what happens when a game has competition and your game comes in a little weak.

Obviously it’s on Gamepass, but it was last year too so it skews the numbers, but gamepass itself has also just changed, so I wonder if it’s doing as well there.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner
I have GPU but stacked so it’s there until it runs out. The only way I would renew is if Microsoft studios start producing a good supply of quality AAA games and give some indication of what they are really up to console wise, the truth no PR stuff.

Anyway I tried the campaign, yep it’s a bit weird and strange in most places. Gun play is good and graphics seem good and clean and it’s smooth. But definitely not a better campaign.

@get2sammyb I think COD has become rather complacent and has fallen asleep at the wheel. No amount of marketing wizardy from Sony could have saved this entry. BF6 nailed it and gave the fans what they wanted while Activision lost their grip and brought out this schizophrenic release.

Too big to fail… Well, this is just another game that has been bitten by the Xbox bug. The game has been devalued because of Gamepass for sure, I always think that the games released on the service from Microsoft always lacks the quality of games that are not on the service. Thee have been games that have bucked that trend, but they are usually from independent developers that have something that is missing from a vast majority of the consolidated side of the industry, Passion! Expedition 33 and Lies of P were both games that showed real quality on Gamepass, but it sold exceptionally outside of that too because of the quality to both titles. COD is just same old same every year and I haven’t bought an entry in years now. Although I am not the biggest FPS fan, watching Battlefield 6 videos and hearing about it from gamer friends, it would have likely been the title I played if I had to pick one. Microsoft should definitely hold back next year and try to release something a hellova lot better than this, because if they think sales figures are bad this time out, imagine what GTA6 will do to it. Maybe the ‘it’s too big to fail’ statement should be the next slogan used by Xbox officially..

It's not surprising that COD has dropped to this level of quality ever since Activision decided to make the change of having the devs develop a game within 1 year compared to the usual 3 year rotation among Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer.

Microsoft are the masters of bad business decisions

Never helps launching a game from the same series back to back....but that's just one issue

I blame using the geez from Heroes, guy's jinxed 'em!

Call of Duty is a parody of Triple A game development at this point. I’m glad people are aware of its hard pivot into slop and are actually doing the vote with your wallet thing.

@AdamNovice I think Hogwarts Legacy was the best selling game of the year that came and not CoD.

@JohnnyShoulder @AdamNovice yeah also gta5

Everything that Microsoft touches rots. Although CODs death is long overdue.

@UK_ you'd think from the way that "content creators" are crying on twitter that BF6 is a disaster. Even though its an absolute blast to play.

This is what arrogance gets you. EA stepped up their game this year with battlefield and arc raiders has captured the streaming community. It’s looking more and more like a bad acquisition for Microsoft.

Insane that it can take a hit like that to sales numbers and still top the charts.

@ElectricWizard I don’t think it is something amazing as COD is the only major new game released this month (also multi-platform)

@get2sammyb
Sorry Sammy, there may be a minor typo error in your article.

Your 2nd paragraph reads "The reports suggests that its debut week is an eye-popping 63% below Battlefield 6, and at least 50% down compared to last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6."

The embedded twitter post states ("more than") "60%" for the second value (ie vs COD:BO6 last year).

Sorry for hating, but I hope this franchise will close finally. Tbh this is typical AI gen game and the same precedure as every year. Boring and silly imo.

Finally, people are tired of eating the same regurgitated *****.

I haven’t played a cod game since og modern warfare 2. If it was gone tomorrow, I wouldn’t notice

Call of Duty is a scam at the moment. A generic live service game with annual releases that lack any quality standards. I hope Microsoft forces Activision to change its strategy and abandon the annual release in favor of producing one Call of Duty title every three years, giving the studios enough budget and time to create a high-quality game with a good story mode, similar to Cyberpunk 2077. Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders have completely dominated the FPS genre this year, and it's a good thing that Call of Duty is falling behind, because losing money is the only way for Activision to realize it needs to focus on making quality games once more.

@Bionic-Spencer

The typical "Game Pass makes bad games" cliche. Game Pass is a subscription service, and its success is determined by how much engagement it can generate in order to increase the number of subscribers willing to pay for the content it provides. High-quality games imply high-quality content, which may increase engagement and overall value of the service, attracting more subscribers and increasing revenue. This is the standard business model for any subscription service: spend on content, engage with it, and grow the subscription. Netflix, the world's leading streaming service with over 300 million subscribers, spends $17 billion per year on original shows and films to keep engagement high and subscriptions growing.

However, Netflix has been chastised for its "quantity over quality" strategy, which entails spending a lot of money to produce large amounts of low-quality content. Other subscription services, such as HBO and Apple TV, take a more premium approach, producing fewer, high-budget, high-quality prestige series and films, resulting in a library of high-quality content for subscribers.

The true question is whether Game Pass should follow Netflix's or HBO's strategy. Personally, I prefer the "HBO way" of producing less but better content. I don't want 75 day-one annual releases of low-quality indie games; instead, I'd like 25-30 day-one games that are AAA/AAA productions with an emphasis on quality and good production values, which translates to 2-3 day-one games per month to maintain engagement. To round out the lineup, I'd like to add 8-10 more high-quality indies like Hollow Knight: Silksong. I want games like Hellblade 2, Hi-Fi Rush, Clair Obscur, Yakuza games, South of Midnight, Doom Dark Ages, Indiana Jones, the upcoming Gears, Blade, and so on.

Good. Hopefully it teaches them a lesson.

Good on BF6, was the much better release this yr. Problem is, it can never truly overtake unless it annualises itself, and then it would have all the same issues CoD has. CoD will recover by the time the next BF launches in 3 to 4 years, but lets see...

@Nepp67 The switch from the rotation mainly has to do with the fact Sledgehammer can’t make a CoD game to save their lives. They was supposed make Cold War with Raven Software, but development went no where. So treyarch was pulled in to lead development. Sledgehammer was hit the heaviest of the CoD studios with lay off, so I doubt they’ll lead a CoD title for a bit. But the rotation was due to have mainly 1 main studio + several support studio assisting with development. But Treyarch hasn’t solely developed a game since BO4. The last 3 BO games has had 2 main studios + several support studios.

Nobody realised that they spent their money on the mobile division rather than COD. Candy Crush and the mobile games make them a fortune that easily covers console/PC game losses.