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Why Call of Duty Is Failing, Losing Money and Players


Cheaters in Call of Duty 4
Credit: Activision

Since 2021, monthly active users (MAUs) for Activision games have plummeted from 150 million players in March 2021 to a new low of 100 million players in March 2022. These MAUs are spread across all of Activision's games, which includes all of the Call of Duty games, including Warzone. This is a massive dropoff in players, and no doubt, this has been caused by a variety of factors.

So, what's going on with Call of Duty? In this article, we'll explain why Call of Duty is failing, losing money and players.

Cheaters in Call of Duty

Cheaters in Call of Duty
click to enlarge
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Credit: Activision
Cheaters in Call of Duty

In Warzone, in particular, cheating has been a massive, sustained problem since the game originally launched as part of Modern Warfare (2019). A big part of the reason why cheating has been such an issue in Warzone is twofold: one, the game's near-unbelievable level of success, and two, the game's lack of a robust anti-cheat solution.

Given the popularity of Warzone, there are significantly more players on PC than there are in an average Call of Duty game, and PC players are responsible for the vast and overwhelming majority of cheating, because of how easy it is to run software on a computer that manipulates the Warzone client.

Related: Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile Explained: Release Date, Cross-Play, Maps, and More

The nature of Warzone, as a game, also makes the cheating problem more complicated. In traditional Call of Duty, you'll see the occasional aimbotter or wallhacker, but you'll die a bunch of times in a game. The action is fast-paced, and games are usually very short.

Warzone is a slower, longer game where your performance in an entire match is routinely decided by the outcome of a single gunfight. And especially as matches go on for longer and longer and near the end, getting wiped out by an aimbotter in the final circle is a fairly devastating blow to morale.

However, Warzone did eventually get an anti-cheat solution, Ricochet. Unfortunately, the Vanguard-era evolution of Warzone, while it did include anti-cheat, did not stop as many cheaters as was expected and did introduce many new problems into the game, most of which made the game laggier.

Related: Call of Duty: Warzone Is Broken and Won’t Be Fixed Without a Sequel: Warzone 2

Altogether, when you combine the game's cheating problem with the game's connection issues with the game's longstanding problems with all kinds of glitches and technical issues, Warzone feels like a mess and has been one for years. This, no doubt, has discouraged many players from booting Call of Duty back up.

Vanguard's Spectacular Failure

Cheaters in Call of Duty 2
click to enlarge
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Credit: Activision
Cheaters in Call of Duty 2

Vanguard has been a fairly substantial failure for Activision. Its sales disappointed the publisher, and since the game came out, it's been rocked by technical issues, design flaws, and all kinds of problems.

Moreover, the general sentiment of the Call of Duty community is clear: Fans don't want a WWII game. They want modern games or futuristic games, especially as the litany of attachments, equipment, and skins that come to Call of Duty are inevitably going to be massively anachronistic in a WWII game.

Related: Sledgehammer Games Is Saving Call of Duty: Vanguard and Treyarch and Infinity Ward Should Take Note

Vanguard, for many, didn't deviate from Modern Warfare (2019) enough, and it introduced a slew of new problems not present in Modern Warfare (2019). So, for many, Modern Warfare (2019) is a more attractive, interesting game that may have some of the same problems as Vanguard but doesn't have nearly as many.

For example, one of the biggest issues in Warzone and Modern Warfare (2019) is balance. Guns and attachments oftentimes didn't work right, had unintended effects, or simply were too weak or too powerful. Vanguard makes this fundamental issue a lot worse but expanding how many attachments weapons can have all the while speeding up gameplay and keeping time-to-kill low.

Vanguard's much-hated Zombies mode is another major reason for the game's failure. Many went into Vanguard excited for a Treyarch-developed Zombies mode that relied on the beautiful, smooth Modern Warfare (2019) engine. However, while Black Ops Cold War Zombies was massively successful, Vanguard's Zombies isn't because Treyarch didn't give fans the classic Zombies experience they actually wanted.

Related: Call of Duty: Vanguard Got a Huge New Update Overhauling Spawns

Even if good Zombies content comes to Vanguard as has been promised, it'll likely be too little, too late. Much like how Cold Wars' huge variety of maps didn't matter to many fans who picked up the game at launch only to find a few maps actually there at launch.

COVID-19, Modern Warfare, and Call of Duty

Cheaters in Call of Duty 3
click to enlarge
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Credit: Activision
Cheaters in Call of Duty 3

In the fall of 2019, the reboot of Modern Warfare that coincidentally introduced Warzone to the world was released. A few months later, COVID-19 rapidly began spreading across the world. For many, many gamers, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 were some of the best, most beloved video gaming memories they have.

Calling back to these games with a reboot pulled on nostalgia hard and at the right time all the while massively evolving the Call of Duty formula into a big, huge, open-world modern Call of Duty battle royale. With so many people inside without much to do, Call of Duty capitalized on this not just because the games were so unbelievably good.

Related: A New Era of Call of Duty Is Coming: CoD 2.0 Explained

As COVID-19 slows down and two more Call of Duty games have been released since Modern Warfare, the obsession with the franchise has naturally died down, massively reducing the game's players. And the undercurrent of technical issues that never seem to get fixed alongside a predatory monetization system make Call of Duty a tough franchise to stick around with for a long time.

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