Call of Duty Loses 50 Million Players in One Year – What’s Going So Wrong?

Call of Duty’s parent company, Activision Blizzard, recently provided information on finances and player numbers in the first quarterly report for 2022. It was noticeable that Activision’s games in particular are suffering from severe game loss – CoD lost 50 million players in one year. MeinMMO takes a look at what’s behind it.

Publisher and stock company Activision Blizzard reported in its latest financial report on sales, profits and player numbers and had to accept some setbacks in important key figures in the last year.

As a result, the number of monthly active players for Activision titles fell to around 100 million. That was a good 50 million fewer than in March 2021:

The so-called “MAUs” (Monthly Active Users) represent an average value and do not differentiate between game and platform for Activision titles. A player can therefore count more often in the statistics.

However, since Blizzard and King are listed separately and Activision itself sells hardly any other major games, the numbers can be related almost entirely to Call of Duty. The largest shooter franchise has lost around 30% of its active players over the year.

What reasons does Activision give? The publisher remains quite vague when researching the causes and gives the following reasons for the decline:

In a statement, the corona pandemic is also listed as a reason, which on the one hand reduces the purchasing power of customers and at the same time impairs the development of content.

Why are the player counts declining? CoD: Mobile is very popular, but is apparently struggling with signs of saturation. The fact that Activision was unable to reach new players here actually seems to be the biggest surprise.

Because with the sales of CoD: Vanguard, this development was already foreseeable, similar to the free Battle Royale Warzone.

Vanguard has been fighting reservations about the setting since the first leaks appeared. The Second World War did not convince many players, there was no real hype and the general innovations in the shooter were too meager.

Sales in the UK, for example, fell by 40% compared to its predecessor, Cold War (via gamesindustry.biz) – and Cold War sold worse than the CoD hit Modern Warfare from 2019.

It’s also been a disappointing year for Warzone and its players. Little content, hardly any changes and the new, large map Caldera did not bring the desired change. Players even want the old map Verdansk back.

There were also big problems with cheaters and errors in the games. Season 2 was even postponed to give the developers 2 more weeks to fix the biggest issues:

How does Call of Duty plan to stop the trend? Although the financial report mentions that the current Vanguard and Warzone received substantial updates in the first quarter, Activision is looking ahead:

• The development of the new premium CoD is progressing well
  • The successor to CoD MW 2019 is planned – the most successful part of the series so far
• Warzone: Mobile is coming
  • The Battle Royale aims to repeat the great success on mobile
• Warzone 2 will be revealed later this year
  • The successor to the Battle Royale is built from the ground up, with many innovations
• More staff for Activision
  • More and more people are being hired to create more content for all CoD titles

Call of Duty has benefited greatly from rising player numbers during the Corona pandemic but has not been able to keep up the momentum and lost around 50 million players in a year.

We’re also interested in your perspective from the player’s point of view: Has the content of Call of Duty been less attractive for you in the last year? What do you wish for in the future from the largest shooter franchise in the world?

Leave us a comment with your thoughts on the topic.

If you would rather find out about the current content of CoD, then take a look here: CoD Warzone: All information about Monster Season 3 / 2022 – Release, Trailer & Content