The shock of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 having stumbled out of the gate has clearly hit publisher Activision hard. Reports that the latest entry in the annual franchise has seen a slump in player numbers are seemingly confirmed by a statement the publisher put out late last night, in which it was stated that “the Franchise has not met your expectations fully,” and that as a result there will no longer be “back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops games.”
For over 20 years, the Call of Duty franchise has been the backbone of Microsoft-owned Activision’s sales, more often than not the best-selling game of a given year, and routinely bringing in in excess of $2 billion. But in 2025, that run seems to have once more faltered. Observable player numbers are way down, user reviews are extremely bad, and old rivals like Battlefield have reappeared and eaten its lunch.
To be completely clear, Black Ops 7 isn’t a disaster! It will likely make a solid profit, perhaps be one of the best-selling games of 2025, but the issue likes in Activision’s colossal expectations for the series. Anything short of record-breaking popularity is perceived as failure, given how much of the company’s financial claims will have been predicated on such success. This has clearly spooked the now Microsoft-owned Activision Blizzard so much that it’s made a public statement, ostensibly directed to players but clearly aimed at shareholders, to mea culpa and promise to do better next year.
The whole statement is a masterclass in euphemism, each negative phrased as a positive, its opening paragraph thanking us for “the feedback” from a “passionate community” (“please stop yelling!”) and stating “we know what you expect and rest assured we will deliver,” (“we fucked up, we know we fucked up!”).
After announcing a free week next week for multiplayer and Zombies, and explaining how impossibly brilliant the seasonal updates are going to be, the statement eventually states that “our strategy going forward is changing.”
We will no longer do back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops games. The reasons are many, but the main one is to ensure we provide an absolutely unique experience each and every year.
We will drive innovation that is meaningful, not incremental. While we aren’t sharing those plans today, we look forward to doing so when the time is right.
This seems very much designed to respond to widespread complaints that this year’s outing feels too familiar with a terrible always-online campaign, thus losing the public’s wider interests when there’s a big, bold and fresh-feeling Battlefield 6 to be playing instead.
A Eurogamer interview with The Game Business‘s Chris Dring last week reported that not only had Black Ops 7 not performed well since its November 14 release, but that Call of Duty has a whole has seen far lower numbers of players throughout 2025. While no official sales or player numbers have been reported by Activision, and things are futher obfuscated by the game being released on Game Pass, public facing stats like those of SteamDB show just how few people are playing CoD on Steam compared to both previous years and this years strong competition in the form of Battlefield 6, Helldivers 2 and free-to-play Delta Force.
Innovation vs. escalation
Of course, what this statement is not saying is that there won’t be a new Call of Duty in 2026, but rather that it won’t be Modern Warfare or Black Ops. The last time the franchise featured any other branch was 2021’s Call of Duty: Vanguard, and before that, 2017’s Call of Duty: WWII. Both were the best-selling games in the U.S. in their years, but it’s noteworthy that Activision was still disappointed by Vanguard‘s sales, blaming this on the World War II setting and a lack of “innovation.”
It seems we’re back there once again, although this time the franchise is in a tougher spot. Vanguard‘s perceived failures were cited as being because of what it wasn’t, and the company was able to declare that no one need worry (it was in the midst of the sexual abuse scandals, some specific to Call of Duty management, as well as trying to ensure its $69 billion sale to Microsoft), and that next year there would instead be a game-changing new entry in the Modern Warfare series. But this time, the statement promises nothing at all beyond hopes and dreams, given falling back on what’s worked before clearly isn’t the answer.
It remains to be seen if there even is an answer. 22 years of annual releases (plus spin-offs) is enough to exhaust even the most ardent, die-hard fan, and after a while just the words “Call of Duty” can feel leaden, even outdated. It would be more sensible for Activision and Microsoft to pull back on expectations, perhaps spend less on a game that innovates rather than escalates, fascinating a gaming audience into not wanting to be left out. But given the need to appease shareholders, the forced move is always to go bigger, spend more, risk more, and make more. If the issue really is general fatigue among players, that could be a hefty disaster.
“To be clear,” ends the “Call of Duty team’s” statement, “the future of Call of Duty is very strong and we believe our best days are ahead of us given the depth and talent of our development teams.” It continues,
“We have been building the next era of Call of Duty, and it will deliver precisely on what you want along with some surprises that push the Franchise and the genre forward. We look forward to welcoming you in, listening to you, and moving forward together.”
It’s going to be an interesting year.
