For years, Call of Duty was one of the safest bets in the games business, yet this time something feels off: Activision is not sharing any hard numbers for the latest entry, and the few data points that have surfaced so far paint a worrying picture of where the series stands right now.

The Call of Duty franchise spent the last decade and a half on an almost perfectly smooth trajectory. Ever since the breakout success of the fourth game, the original Modern Warfare, Activision’s shooter has been one of the most reliable money makers in the industry, even when a misfire like Ghosts still shifted millions of copies. What we might be looking at now is either another major stumble, a dark chapter in the saga’s history, or a moment that ends up marking a new turning point.

First, it is worth laying out the cold facts. To do that, we have to look past the little bits of retail folklore that have surfaced lately, as electronics chains and second hand stores try to ride the wave of criticism around Black Ops 7. Some of those talking points sound very much like marketing, from Cash Converters allegedly asking customers not to bring in more copies of the game, to Worten building a stunt around supposed mass returns.

Once you strip away that noise, there is not much solid information left. What we do have is data such as analyst and journalist Christopher Dring’s report that physical sales of Black Ops 7 in the United Kingdom are down 61 percent compared to the 2024 entry, and SteamDB numbers showing that the peak concurrent player count on Steam at launch was roughly a third of what that previous title achieved.

We could avoid speculation, but that would require Activision to release proper launch figures. Instead, the publisher has limited itself to a statement with no concrete numbers, talking about “a great response to the quality and depth of the gameplay”. Social media outrage never tells the whole story about a game’s audience, yet widely shared complaints about the look of the AI and a campaign that many players find confusing have made the overall conversation around Black Ops 7 tilt more negative than positive. Right now, it stands as the lowest rated Call of Duty on Metacritic based on user scores.

Even from Microsoft’s side, there is little to grab onto. Phil Spencer quote-tweeted the original announcement post to thank the development teams and say they had “made history again”, congratulating them on “this incredible milestone”. The issue is that nobody outside the company really knows what that milestone actually is, not in terms of total unit sales and not in terms of how the game has affected Game Pass subscriptions or revenue for the service.

What has been reported, though, is that launching Black Ops 6 directly into Game Pass led to around 300 million dollars in lost direct sales according to business outlet Bloomberg, which does not exactly line up with Satya Nadella’s earlier talk of it being the “best launch ever”. It is also worth remembering that the series stayed away from subscription services for years until Microsoft acquired Activision, something the publisher’s former boss Bobby Kotick addressed very plainly: “I do not agree with the idea of a multi game subscription as a business model for the future”.

In the end, it remains genuinely difficult to get a clear, data driven view of how Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has performed at launch, but every indicator we do have suggests that this is one of the franchise’s most complicated moments in its big return. Player sentiment around the game appears to be bruised by contentious design decisions, and it does not help that Microsoft leans on public facing success metrics that have previously been followed by studio closures, as in the cases of Tango and Hi-Fi Rush. As with so many other issues at the company, the only way to truly understand what is happening will be to watch what the consequences look like over the coming months.

Source: 3djuegos