Black Ops 6 Gives Xbox The W It’s Been Waiting For
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.”
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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.
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Black Ops 6, As Told By Steam Reviews
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is, understandably, a pretty big deal. The franchise has been in a bit of a lull lately, despite routinely setting new sales records, and this game especially needed to be a slam dunk given its unique position. As the first Call of Duty game to release on Game Pass following Microsoft’s purchase of Activision—which itself has been followed by numerous disastrous layoffs—Black Ops 6 has been touted as a return to form for the series, as well as for its embattled publisher. The status of its probable release on Game Pass was debated for months until it was finally confirmed, and now it’s Microsoft’s single greatest chance to bolster the stagnant subscription service and make good on promises.
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Recent installments in the franchise like Modern Warfare III, Vanguard, and Black Ops Cold War have been met with a decidedly more tepid reception than, say, 2019’s Modern Warfare or even the battle royale game Warzone. It almost seems like with every new entry of late the series has strayed from the desires of its outsized and fairly casual audience. Call of Duty is, after all, one of those games that most people pick up once a year and play till the next one comes along, much like a sports game. Folks who play those games tend to want refinements of core principles rather than drastic or convoluted reinventions.
All of which is to say, Black Ops 6’s return-to-basics approach was a welcome bit of news among the cacophony of showcases, directs, and overbearing blog posts about why this game would be the best Call of Duty ever. After MWIII’s flop of an open-ended campaign, Black Ops 6 doubled down on having a cinematic, blockbuster story mode like the best in the series have offered. Its iteration on Zombies feels like a healthy mixture of new and classic features and mechanics. Even the multiplayer feels sensibly pared back, and it restores tenets that fans have missed, like the prestige system. Treyarch and Xbox clearly want us to think that Call of Duty is “back,” but is it really?
According to the reviews that Black Ops 6 is accruing on Steam, the answer’s a bit more complicated than a simple yes or no. Fans seem to generally agree that the campaign here is better than average, and some are even calling it the best story mode in a COD game in years. And of course there are players who have cherished the simplified renditions of both the competitive multiplayer suite and the cooperative Zombies mode, myself included. As is always going to be the case with a series this big and this polarizing, though, the more you look, the more people you’ll find who are disappointed in some of the game’s features.
One of the biggest problems many seem to have with Black Ops 6 actually has little to do with the game itself and more to do with the packaging, specifically the launcher, Call of Duty HQ. While the tool has been reworked since its initial release, it isn’t significantly better, and it seems to be even worse on PC, where fans of the series seem to hate it more than I do! One review joked that Black Ops 6 is actually a “game is updating simulator.”
Elsewhere, Black Ops 6’s various modes are causing division. Some are appreciating their time with the competitive multiplayer suite, but there are also repeated mentions of terrible maps and spawns throughout the reviews. Having played the beta extensively, as well as jumping in after launch, I can kind of agree that there don’t seem to be any unilateral winners among the crop of multiplayer arenas available right now. Zombies has enjoyed a more positive reception than multiplayer, but still there are players who are unhappy with the settings and crying out for more ambient (spookier) maps in the future.
Overall, Black Ops 6 seems to be earning its “Mixed” reception on Steam. It isn’t the greatest game, but it’s a perfectly fine and fun middling title, and that’s about all I need from it to have a great time. The divisiveness surrounding the game is at least producing some good material in the Steam reviews page, though, so read it and weep.
