The release of a new game in the franchise causes a significant and permanent exodus of players from previous titles (over 50% from both Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2 upon the launch of Modern Warfare 3 in November 2011).Black Ops player counts dropped below the year-older Modern Warfare 2 only a few short months after launch (as we previously analysed), and remained there.Steam free weekends don’t seem to noticeably stem player attrition.The more extreme peaks are Steam free weekends, where the full multiplayer game is offered free-to-play (a temporary boost of up to 40% for the free period).The consistent peaks and valleys shown are regular weekends.
Unfortunately we only started collecting the numbers at the end of 2010 (a month after the launch of the first Black Ops), and of course Call of Duty’s primary fanbase lives on the console platforms, so it’s difficult to know if these same trends apply to the multi-platform brand as a whole, but let’s work with what we have. The above chart shows the activity of PC players in the last three Call of Duty games, on Steam, over the last two years. So is there anything we can gleam from the latest Steam data (that we’ve gathered daily from the public website)? Let’s take a look. The same report cited other analysts who share the same concern, but qualified it with uncertainty, such as: if CoD was to lose market share, who would be taking it? And is continued growth in Western retail sales as important now when the brand is making moves into China and continuing to explore other methods of monetisation? Games Industry International reported comments from Ben Schachter of Macquarie Securities saying “we have significant concerns that CoD may have peaked in 2011”.
Activision is poised to launch Call of Duty: Black Ops II worldwide on November 13, 2012, and hope to once again break records for the biggest launch in entertainment history, a bar that they have raised several times with the blockbuster franchise.īlack Ops II has reportedly already broken the record as the most pre-ordered game in North American retailer GameStop’s history, as 2011’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had done before it, but is that necessarily an indication of growth in the game’s longer term performance, or is it just that more players that would have bought the game once it launched were enticed by this year’s pre-order bonuses (revamp of fan-favourite multiplayer map Nuketown, and a double XP launch weekend)?įollowing Activision Blizzard’s second quarter earnings report, several prominent industry analysts weighed in with their thoughts on the growth prospects of the publisher’s CoD-piece with concern that this year’s stimulus package may not be capable of keeping the throbbing franchise upwardly mobile.
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