Black Ops 6 Biggest Ever Call Of Duty Launch Month, According To Activision

Ideal game for GP imo. Requires online anyways, so might as well just upgrade to GPU. Basically pays for 60% of a yearly GPU sub right away (year of online + cost of the game itself).

Seems like did not hurt overall sales. Down on xbox as expected but offset by ps5/pc. Thats good result.

I’ve got around 40 hours of gameplay in the multiplayer and love it. Maybe 10 hours in Zombies and thats fun too. This is the best COD in my opinion since Xbox 360 days. I am having a lot of fun with it and hope they continue to improve it and expand it over the months ahead.

Well deserved! It's one of the best shooter campaigns I have ever played and I have played plenty. Multiplayer is also excellent. Not rushing the development paid off.

COD and gamepass were made for each other. All around great game.

It’s the first COD I’ve played since the original Modern Warfare 2 way back in 2009.
Thoroughly enjoying it. Had a great time with the beta, and I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit getting trampled in the multiplayer and zombies since launch. Ive only done a few single player missions, but I already like the variety between stealth and all-out carnage.
Already have GPU stacked for a few years to come, so laid the extra £30 to get the all-bells-and-whistles edition (or whatever it’s called) and haven’t regretted it for a second.

Finished the campaign on xCloud a few weeks ago. Thought it was great. That said, I only play CoD games for the single player campaigns, which have long surpassed those of the Battlefield franchise (sadly).

So if I gave something away for free I could get the biggest engagement.
But I have sold nothing and made no money.
Sales is always the best level metric

@OldGamer999 It is strange isn't it? Previous CoD games Activision was quick to boast about sales or reaching milestones like crossing $1B in sales the fastest in series history, like what happened with 2022's MW2. Now the metric is engagement.

Haven't played Cod since the 360 days but loving this one campaign was great multiplayer is amazing and recently started playing zombies and it's really fun top quality gamepass addition has to be 10/10 for me 👍👏

It was a good campaign so Im happy, nice to see that its well recieved over all. Would prefer to have sales reported instead of ”engagement” though, but guess with the game being on gamepass sales makes it seem a bit less successful!

A massive money earner like Activision would only sell because they don't see endless growth on the horizon anymore. So when Microsoft made the purchase they really had to prove quickly that they made a worthwhile investment. That if Activision can't grow alone anymore, Activision added to their Xbox strategy will accelerate growth overall. This isn't just the massive boon in year over year added revenue they can report (as after a year that massive percent increase is gone), but proof that ABK truly can support growing their preexisting gaming strategies overall. And I'd say that's largely the case. After the first major new first party release from ABK, they can say that COD, one of the biggest games to date that everyone (including clearly the ABK shareholders) had thought peaked, is bigger. They can say Game Pass also grew in subscribers. While they can't say that new Xbox users grew a lot, they can say that engagement on Xbox consoles for existing users was bonkers (I expect we'll also see increased spending). A lot of that is just on the devs for putting out a good game, but then also the inclusion on Game pass and even just being able to prevent Sony from having its exclusivity deals. I think Microsoft has proven that, at least to them, purchasing ABK wasn't just for increased revenue but actually an investment. Which is what they said... so yeah. I guess not anything really unexpected there.

@OldGamer999 I'm curious what your definition of free is.

@oopsiezz It's not strange at all. Like you are aware Activision has gone from a public shareholder company to a subsidiary right? They shared those milestones because that was the only way for them to communicate success to their shareholders. On the other hand Microsoft is a trillion dollar+ public company. Their shareholders don't care much about their gaming business and it's far from the only way they can report success to them. This was always going to be the case. Something discussed by people with pros and cons. Namely that shareholders aren't going to be breathing down necks as much for games to churn out more and more profit every year, but gamers and analysts will also never see detailed data again.

Gaming has become an increasingly important business for Microsoft, but it's still a small part of what Microsoft is worth. For that matter initially shareholders just saw Xbox's numbers and asked Microsoft to pull out because the shareholders were also aware of Nintendo and Sony's numbers and those were the HOLY GRAIL and still really bad for a company of Microsoft's size. Like seriously let's give Xbox Nintendo Switch success. After 7 years the console hasn't even managed to sell 150 million units for $200 to $400 each... why would shareholders care about that when Windows 11 & 10 alone are installed on more than 1.4 billion devices. And there's still older versions of windows out in the wind. Official windows 8 support only completely ended in 2023. That's all to say that Microsoft is a much larger company and Activision is now solely a subsidiary. Total numbers will be reported as always but we'll likely never see detailed info on how gaming is doing because that information was never for us. It's for the shareholders. And now Activision has none (they don't have to put up a front for anyone; they're a publisher under Microsoft Gaming and will share what they want to share if anything at all). Microsoft has lots of shareholders and they mostly don't really care that much about gaming. Just like Apple Shareholders aren't waiting with bated breath to hear how Ted Lasso did. They'll take the info and are interested in Apple's growth to new industries and markets for the company's overall health, but they don't REALLY care that much about how Apple the computer and software company is doing in movies and TV. Whereas for a company like Paramount, that's pretty much all they have to report to shareholders on and its why people bought shares in the company.

Then there's also the really short and grounded response of there now being more ways to access COD Black Ops than just sales, so just talking about sales wouldn't paint a full picture. If you want to know sales we have information on that from analysts. Literally linked at the end of this article. But yeah, I mean..., why would "not a standalone company" report "not the full picture" to "nobody in particular". That doesn't make sense on a lot of levels. I think a lot of times we see this information and forget... It's not and never was directed at us. At most maybe just to say thanks (from the soulless corporations that just sold billions of dollars worth of product).

Totally off-topic question: Does anyone know if/how you can add GP games to your “play later” list? I don’t see the option anymore now GP is integrated in the general iOS app (it was a function in the standalone app that’s not usable anymore).

@OldGamer999 As I get told EVERY time I say 'Free' with Game Pass, that they are NOT Free but cost $10-20 a month so if '5m' decide to stop paying $70 to buy the game and pay $20 a month on Game Pass on Xbox console, that's still $100m in revenue instead of $350m from 'sales', but then if they play next month too, that's another $100m etc.

Plus of course this being a Live Service game, there is the Season Battle Pass, the Cosmetic Bundles, CoD points etc that are also sold. With more people playing and having fun, chances are more 'sales' of these. They aren't just for the Free to Play Warzone mode!

Base sales of the game may well not be the 'highest' ever for a CoD game, but I also expect that the sales of Battle Passes, Bundles etc to be higher which is where a LOT of money is made. In 2021, 61% of ABK's revenue came from Microtransactions and in 2022, Microtransactions generated nearly $6bn worth of sales in the US.

Call of Duty these days generates more income from the sales of Battle Passes, CoD Points and/or Cosmetic bundles than from sales of the Base Game. In other words, the more people you get in, the more people you can sell those too, the more money these make.

I find it funny though that when its 'Call of Duty', its all about the loss of 'Sales' of the base game with MS giving the game away 'FREE' despite making more from Microtransactions, but talk about Game Pass in general, and NOTHING is FREE if you have to spend $20 a month.

It's kind of surreal that MS owns COD. It's been a while, but that doesn't make it any less strange.

@BAMozzy
Of course I get what you are saying.
My nephews seem to want V Bucks for Christmas this year, which is Fortnight money I believe.

So much money made with these sort of transactions.

I guess why companies like Sony have been chasing the GAAS model for a few years now.

It goes to show how wrong the PlayStation gamers were....

@OldGamer999 its not for free. you get people to sign up for the most expensive tier (GPU) and if they stick with it they will spend more down the road than 1 time purchase. COD earns as much or probably more on the monetization + deluxe upgrades, so certain people who forego buying the game still ended up spending in-game. like its easy to access game with GP and buy a deluxe upgrade, its easy to just pay $10 for BP if you dont have to buy the game. So now they are earning on people who would not consider buying game.

As soon as we started talking monetization, F2p models and subscription services, game sales has stopped being a main metric.

@BAMozzy some people are stuck with how it worked in 90-00s. I dont know how else to explain the different business models for different games. Imagine them looking at f2p game and calling it a failure because 0 sales lol.
With COD in particular: they still sold actual copies across the board (less on xbox but decent on pc/ps5), they got people to sing for GPU or upgrade to GPU from cheaper tiers. They have more players playing and more microtransactions to earn.