Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is the first entry in the annual blockbuster to be announced and released since Microsoft acquired it alongside the rest of Activision Blizzard last October. And by all accounts, it gives Xbox the boost it needs in a difficult year. On an earnings call this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called it the “biggest.” Call of duty publication ever.”
The company announced that Black Ops 6’s three-day release had the most players, hours played and total matches played of any game in the two-decade-old military shooter series. Nadella added during the call that the game set a record for “Game Pass subscriber additions on launch day” and that sales on PlayStation and Steam were up 60 percent compared to last year Modern warfare 3.
“This reflects our strategy to meet players where they are by enabling them to play more games on the screens where they spend their time,” Nadella said. Aside from being the first installment in the series to launch on day one via a subscription service, Black Ops 6 is the first company to support cloud gaming. Additionally, there was no early access period for the single-player campaign and no exclusive content or perks for PlayStation users. The entire series recently sold over 500 million copies, and an Activision executive told that Washington Post that the structure of the how Call of duty is “not changed” under Microsoft.
We don’t have any concrete numbers yet. Microsoft is a black box when it comes to sales data. There is no total player count or sales figures that can be graphed Black Ops 6is a success, and we don’t know how many more Game Pass subscribers have joined the $20-a-month tier to play it as part of the Netflix-style free game library. Some analysts have predicted the game’s release could add another 4 million to the existing 34 million last February, although possibly at the expense of 6 million sales.
But it’s clear that the globe-trotting shooter series’ dominance hasn’t waned just yet. Circana CEO Mat Piscatella, said his player engagement tracker showed 52 percent of all active Xbox Series X/S players and 34 percent of all active PS5 players started Call of Duty HQ on Oct. 28, roughly double the number from the previous week and an all-time high. “Over HALF of all daily active players on a platform playing a game is crazy engaged,” he wrote. And after a string of mediocre to terrible entries, Black Ops 6 has collected some rave reviews.
The jury is still out on whether this pivotal moment for Game Pass will ultimately justify the subscription service or whether a $69 billion acquisition will help propel it forward. The program and the broader Xbox platform, like Microsoft as a whole, are currently at a confusing crossroads is reportedly cracking down on profitability. Perhaps Black Ops 6 will show that the needle can be threaded on a future Xbox with fewer exclusives and blockbuster games not being completely cannibalized by subscription access from day one.
For now, it’s a much-needed victory for a platform that attracted black eyes. Out of Mass layoffs and closures of beloved studios to exclusive things like meet and miss Starfield And Senua’s Saga: Hellblade IIIt’s been an uneven year for Xbox. take refuge in The best-selling franchise for eight of the last ten years It may not be the exciting future that Xbox console diehards once dreamed of, but it could prove to be a more reliable way to drive up the numbers than anything else Microsoft has done in gaming this generation has.
The worst reality for Xbox right now is that hardware sales continue to decline while gaming and service revenue continues to rise. Console sales fell again by 29 percent year-over-year, with that number expected to be even worse over the holidays. Game Pass, on the other hand, “set a new record for total revenue and average revenue per subscriber in the first quarter,” Nadella said. “And as we look to the future, our intellectual property in our studios has never been stronger.” But the only one he mentioned by name was Call of duty.
