6. 8. 4. 8. 7.

No, those aren’t the numbers, Mason – they’re the scores of our last five Call of Duty reviews. (Excluding this year’s Black Ops ports, which absolutely exploded on the PS5.)

They’re not terrible ratings by any stretch, but they’re perhaps lower than you’d expect from a series that’s as popular as Call of Duty is.

Speaking with The Game Business, Activision’s chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl blamed the results on a so-called “Call of Duty tax”.

He explained, as spotted by VGC:

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“I think we get the coverage [from traditional games media], but we call it the ‘Call of Duty tax’. When we’re thinking about the reviews or we’re thinking about the reception and stuff, in a lot of ways there’s obviously a lot of fandom around indie games, and excitement around new games popping up every day on Steam.”

Bahl insinuated that he feels because Call of Duty has been around for so long, the efforts of the 4,500 people working on the franchise is somewhat overlooked.

I’d tend to agree that there probably is a sense of exhaustion that inherently stems from a series that’s been annualised for approaching decades now, but if the games are good, they’ll get the credit they deserve.

My takeaway, looking at the ratings I listed above, is that Activision probably can’t support an annual release cadence anymore. It looks like strong years tend to be followed by weaker ones.

Bahl said he feels the game’s overwhelming popularity “sometimes gets overlooked”. He explained that the marketing around this year’s Modern Warfare 4 was built to showcase the game’s “craft”.

I do think this year’s title looks a lot better than Black Ops 7, but I also think the shooter’s getting drowned out by all of the discourse around GTA 6.

Last year’s entry was a bit of a commercial flop by Call of Duty standards, although it should be noted that it still sold handsomely compared to most other titles.

Parent company Microsoft was clearly not happy with the results, however, as it yanked this year’s release out of Game Pass, which was a gambit said to have cost the company $300 million in lost revenue.

I personally don’t feel there’s much hype around Modern Warfare 4, but that could just be down to the spaces I operate in. Nevertheless, I genuinely believe the franchise’s marketing was much better when Sony was handling it.

On that note, Circana’s Mat Piscatella says player purchasing intent across PC and console in the US is 15% for this year’s game, which is lower than the 21% achieved by the panned Black Ops 7. I wonder how much GTA 6 is eating into that.

And I wonder whether Microsoft can afford another “soft” year for Call of Duty, because this is not a cheap franchise to produce on an annual basis.

Are you planning to buy Modern Warfare 4?

[source thegamebusiness.com, via videogameschronicle.com]