It's come to the point that I'm actually surprised when I see any news
about "Call of Duty". It used to be such a major force in the gaming
industry (even if, I think, it was largely undeserved; that games just
weren't that good. But I accept that's a subjective opinion, so feel
free to debate it). But these days? I don't know if the games are good
or not - I more or less gave up on the franchise after the first
"Black Ops"' - but it seems so /dated/. It feels more a
'boomer-shooter' than "Doom", even though the latter precedes the CoD
franchise by more than a decade!

And I don't think I'm the only one. Not having the data on hand - and
being too lazy to look for it - I can't say much about recent sales
figures, except to accept the widely-known fact that sales for the
franchise have been on a downward trend for over a decade. I doubt the
newest games have done anything to reverse that. Instead, I rely on a
more tenuous (and - since it tends to be self-selected data, certainly
less reliable) data: the number of comments made in reply to "Call of
Duty" story has gone way down. Almost any article or video about any
other game garners more user interaction than news about Activision's
flagship games these days.

As I said, this data is self-selecting. I - of course - tend to visit
websites that favor my opinions, so its audience will trend towards
the type who are less interested in "Call of Duty" than other games. I
am sure there are many websites where news about "COD:Warzone"
attracts hundreds of comments while "Elden Ring" stories pass
unnoticed. But which type of site is in the majority? I don't think
I'm that far out of the norm... and when even a story about the
"Conan" MMORPG gets comments while nobody bothers to respond to news
about "CoD:Warzone", that's gotta mean something.

So it's not that the idea that "Call of Duty" is past its prime that
surprises me; after all, that's been fairly obvious since "Modern
Warfare 3", if sales figures are anything to go by. It's that "Call of
Duty" seems to have lost almost all of its cultural relevance. Is
nobody excited about these games anymore?

On Sun, 28 Aug 2022 14:04:36 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>So it's not that the idea that "Call of Duty" is past its prime that
>surprises me; after all, that's been fairly obvious since "Modern
>Warfare 3", if sales figures are anything to go by. It's that "Call of
>Duty" seems to have lost almost all of its cultural relevance. Is
>nobody excited about these games anymore?

Modern Warfare 2019 sold 30,000,000+ copies... Vanguard is
considered a sales disappointment supposedly as a result of the
audience not wanting another WWII setting supposedly.

I play both Vanguard and Warzone (latter is free to play but I guess
is an ongoing revenue stream for them due to freemium).

Both types of servers are always packed at any time of day.

So I doubt its slowing down any time soon.