Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is the first entry in the annual blockbuster to be announced and released since Microsoft acquired it along with the rest of Activision Blizzard last October. And, by all accounts, it’s giving Xbox the boost it needed during a rough year. On an earnings call this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called it the “biggest Call of Duty release ever.”
The company revealed that Black Ops 6’s three-day launch had the most players, hours played, and total matches 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 adds on launch day,” and that sales were up 60 percent on PlayStation and Steam from last year’s Modern Warfare 3.
“This speaks to our strategy of meeting gamers where they are by enabling them to play more games across the screens they spend their time on,” Nadella said. In addition to being the first entry in the series to launch day one on a subscription service, Black Ops 6 is the first to be supported with cloud gaming. There was also no early access period for the single-player campaign, and no exclusive content or perks for PlayStation users. The whole series recently hit over 500 million sales, and an Activision exec told the Washington Post that the structure of how Call of Duty is made “won’t change” under Microsoft.
We still don’t have any hard numbers. Microsoft is a black box when it comes to sales data. There is no total player count or sales figure to try and chart Black Ops 6‘s success, and we don’t know how many more Game Pass subscribers joined the $20-a-month tier to play it as part of the free Netflix-style library of games. Some analysts have predicted the game’s launch could add another 4 million to the existing 34 million shared last February, though potentially at the expense of 6 million sales.
But what’s clear is that the globetrotting shooter franchise’s dominance hasn’t yet waned. Circana executive director, Mat Piscatella, said its player engagement tracker showed 52 percent of all active Xbox Series X/S players and 34 percent of all active PS5 players launched Call of Duty HQ on October 28, roughly double the number from the week prior and an all-time high. “Over HALF of all daily active players on a platform playing one game is bonkers engagement,” he wrote. And after a string of middling to terrible entries, Black Ops 6 has been garnering some rave reviews.
The jury’s still out on whether this make-or-break moment for Game Pass will ultimately vindicate the subscription service or $69 billion acquisition helping to fuel it. The program, and the broader Xbox platform, are currently at a confusing cross roads as Microsoft at large reportedly cracks down on profitability. Maybe Black Ops 6 will show the needle can be thread on a future Xbox with fewer exclusives and where blockbuster games aren’t completely cannibalized by day-one subscription access.
For now, it’s a much needed win for a platform that was racking up black eyes. From mass layoffs and closures of beloved studios to hit and miss exclusives like Starfield and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, it’s been an uneven year for Xbox. Taking refuge in the best-selling franchise for eight of the last 10 years might not be the exciting future Xbox console diehards had once dreamed of, but it may prove to be a more reliable way to make the numbers go up than anything else Microsoft has done in gaming this generation.
The starkest reality for Xbox at the moment is that hardware sales continue to fall while game and service revenue continues to climb. Console sales were down 29 percent again year-over-year, with that number expected to be even worse over the holiday. Game Pass, on the other hand, “set a new Q1 record for total revenue and average revenue per subscriber,” Nadella said. “And as we look ahead, our IP across our studios has never been stronger.” But the only one he mentioned by name was Call of Duty.