Nov 2025 USA Sales: Black Ops 7 Is the Month's Bestseller, But Struggles to Meet Call of Duty Standards

The sad truth is, most studios/publishers would kill to have CoD's "lower than normal" sales figures, really starting to think it is "too big to fail"....

Wait, wasn't COD supposed to be dead for like the 8th year running?

@themightyant I suppose the thing I missed out from my original comment was, 95% of studios/publishers don't have a cool $700M budget (quick google search on BO7) for their games, but yes you are correct it won't be all sun shine and rainbows over at HQ...

A good few of the top ten are games there, that get totally slated on here and other sites and sometimes by reviewers.

Goes to show how small we are and big the general public are and why companies and publishers etc aim at them for sales.

On another note for the USA

The US has suffered its worst November since 1995 in terms of hardware sales
Average hardware prices up 11% on last year.

The ps5 price increase affecting it in the USA, the digital should have been $350 OR $300 since they pay tax seperately but it's 400USD

A bad month for the gaming industry as a whole but especially Nintendo. Yes, the economy is in the toilet but after the success that the Switch 1 was, this can't be the result Nintendo was hoping the successor would have in its first Black Friday especially with the first new Mario Kart in more than a decade bundled in, an awesome 3D DK game and a new Pokémon. That's also with retailers doing their own promotions for the console.
PS5 is now five years on the market and has already sold a healthy amount of units since it launched so, while not great, things also aren't completely disastrous for the brand.

The hardware numbers make sense. Consoles going up in price rather than down (the PS1 launched at $300 but eventually fell to $100) is clearly keeping a big chunk of people out of the market.

If I were a hardware maker intent on releasing new hardware I’d wait for overall inflation/ram prices/tariffs to fall (not sure when that’s going to happen, probably no time soon).

https://bsky.app/profile/matpiscatella.bsky.social/post/3ma6vnwvjmk2h

The average price paid for a new unit of video game hardware in the US during November 2019 was $235. In November 2025 it was $439.

3.9 million units of video game hardware sold in the US in November 2019. In November 2025 it was 1.6 million.

Black Ops 7 is awful. I got to a part in the campaign where I had to kill zombies, or whatever they were meant to be. Turned the game off straight away.

@Carnage yeah I really hope the sales scare them and they delay they PS6. Late adapters spend less not more. the PS5 is more expensive this year black Friday than last year due to tarrifs

While Battlefield 6 did indeed eat up more of Blops7's market share than I predicted, I still resent this insistence that Blops7 is a huge flop. It's still #1 here, is doing just fine in the UK, and I'm sure will remain one of the best selling games of the year.

And people acting like this is the first time CoD struggled to match its one-year predecessor's numbers don't have the full story (for fun, just look up "modern warfare 3 sales down" on Youtube and see how many people were likewise ready to jump on any negative interpretation of that game's sales).

We're also completely missing a BIG part of CoD's perceived success under the Microsoft umbrella: GamePass subs and engagement. I know people like to assume GamePass as a whole isn't profitable — which would certainly explain why Microsoft has abandoned most other revenue sources in favor of it...cause they're stupid, which would be the only logical explanation that meshes well with that proposition — but if it isn't, and if CoD is actually plumping it up, I'd assume that would be considered a success in Microsoft's eyes. And one would assume that if more people are playing CoD through GamePass, that means less people are buying it. Not that I'm saying that's definitely what's happened, just that it's entirely possible and we don't really know either way yet.

I'm entirely willing to admit I was wrong about Battlefield 6's sales power (still didn't personally like it much, though. Not in a 'CoD fanboy' way either; I though Battlefield 1 was better than 6 and any CoD multiplayer I've ever played). But this Blops7 hate remains one of the most obnoxious things to come out of the gaming community this year, in my opinion.

Nice to see Yotei still getting sales.

@themightyant I mean, 'flop' is synonymous with 'failure.' A comparative failure is a comparative flop. So if you're suggesting the former, you're suggesting the latter. There's no definite distinction between the two. Only the possibility of intrinsic connotative differences, which I don't have.

Semantics aside, yes, it's doing worse than Blops6. And yes, it's not one of the series' top-sellers. That might mean it is a comparative failure. But, without full context — which we'll likely never actually get — that remains unclear. We don't know what constitutes a failure at Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard-King for the CoD franchise. Especially when we don't know how this game affected or was affected by GamePass.

And your sales hypothesis is just a hypothesis. I also can't find it 50% off anywhere despite following links from webpages saying exactly that dated just 3-4 days ago (at least in the USA). So if it was 50% off, it has a fairly limited flash sale. And, looking at Blops6's digital sales history, it also had two notable sales before the end of its launch year. Which, to me, points to it all being fairly inconclusive when comparing Blops7's nebulous success to Blops6's nebulous success.