Call Of Duty is dying and its downfall is long overdue – Reader’s Feature-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Is Call Of Duty in trouble? (Activision)

A reader reacts to lower than expected sales for Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 and asks what the future is for the franchise and for Activision as a whole.

The original Call Of Duty came out in 2003 and there now 21 entries in the series, not counting spin-offs. Since the first Modern Warfare they’ve always been in the top three selling games of the year and the majority of them have reviewed pretty well.

The last decade has been a bit more hit and miss than the early days, but I don’t think any reasonable person would consider any of them to be truly bad games, except maybe last year’s Modern Warfare 3 – which was just bumped up DLC and never should’ve been released the way it was.

It’s been a great run, but all good things must come to an end. I’m just surprised how quickly it’s all happening. I thought Black Ops 6 was the fast-selling one ever and yet this week we find out that, in the UK at least, sales were down on Modern Warfare 3 and apparently Call Of Duty: Warzone is in so much trouble Activision won’t even bother with a Warzone 3.

I don’t really play Warzone much anymore. I was long ago put off by all the cheaters, which is so bad it makes the main games seem 100% legit by comparison. I do know that Warzone 2 (which is now just called Warzone) was made to fight the cheater problem, so… I guess that didn’t work out.

It’s a surprise about Warzone but I’m not too bothered about it personally. But to find out that the mainline games are starting to go downhill too is a real milestone moment. I think it’s even more significant that it’s for such a well-liked sequel, like Black Ops 6, and not something like Modern Warfare 3.

Every kid likes playing soldiers so something like Call Of Duty will always exist, but that doesn’t mean it’s always going to be Call Of Duty itself. The problem with a yearly series like this is obvious: it always seems the same and it’s really only the campaigns that help you tell them apart. But even then, there’s a limit to how different they can be and we know how fans reacted when they tried to shake things up with Infinite Warfare.

With so many free games offering similar styles of action I think people are just getting tired of paying £70 for a new Call Of Duty every year. Especially if Activision are going to use the excuse of GTA 6 to increase that to £100. I was mostly happy with Black Ops 6 but there’s no way I would’ve bought it for that much. I don’t think anything could ever make me pay that much for a video game.

So what does Call Of Duty do now? Well, the obvious thing any games company does is go for nostalgia, but they’ve only just rebooted Modern Warfare so I’m not sure what else you could do? I don’t think anyone cares much about the first Black Ops and I’m certain nobody wants any more Second World War games.

It’s meant to be Modern Warfare 4 next, for this year, so I am going to be very interested to see how that goes. I see no reason why it would do better than Black Ops 6 though. So what does Activision do then? What does Microsoft do, considering how they paid over $70 billion for them?

In my best case scenario, they’d go back to being what they were in the 90s: a normal games publisher who publishes lots of different games across all genres. I realise I’m just dreaming, because no publisher does that anymore, but to think what they were 30 years ago and what they are now, there’s absolutely no similarity.

You also would’ve thought that they would’ve learned from the Guitar Hero fiasco, where they ran the whole franchise into the ground in just a few years, that maybe it’s best not to put all your eggs in one basket – in terms of basing your whole company on one just series. Just think how many tens of thousands of people’s jobs must rely on Call Of Duty being popular forever.

But who knows, maybe this will turn out to be a blip. Or maybe this is the moment that people finally get fed up with long-running series that never change. After all, EA Sports FC sales were down at the same time. I don’t know what the future will bring but I’d prefer it wasn’t the same old thing.

By reader Hammeriron

Call Of Duty: Warzone does have a cheating problem (Activision)

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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