Call of Duty’s parent company, Activision Blizzard, recently provided information about finances and player numbers in its first quarterly report of 2022. It was noticeable that Activision’s games in particular are suffering from severe player attrition – CoD lost 50 million players in one year.

Publisher and stock company Activision Blizzard reported on revenue, profits and player numbers in its latest financial report, and suffered some setbacks in key metrics last year.

For example, the number of monthly active players for Activision’s titles fell to around 100 million. That was a good 50 million fewer than in March 2021:

The so-called “MAUs” (Monthly Active Users) represent an average value and do not differentiate between game and platform for Activision’s titles. Accordingly, a player can also be counted more often in the statistics.

However, since Blizzard and King are listed separately and Activision itself hardly distributes any other, big games, the numbers can be almost entirely related to Call of Duty. Thus, the biggest shooter franchise has lost around 30% of its active players in a year’s time.

What reasons does Activision give? The publisher remains rather vague on the cause, citing the following reasons for the decline:

In a statement, the Corona pandemic is also listed as a reason, which on the one hand reduces the purchasing power of customers and at the same time affects the development of content.

Why did the number of players decrease? CoD: Mobile is very popular, but is apparently struggling with saturation phenomena. The fact that Activision couldn’t reach any new players here actually seems to be the biggest surprise.

After all, this development was already foreseeable with the sales of CoD: Vanguard, similar to the free Battle Royale Warzone.

Vanguard has been fighting reservations about the setting since the first leaks surfaced. The Second World War didn’t convince many players, there was no real hype and the general innovations in the shooter were also too meager.

Sales dropped by 40% in the UK, for example, compared to its predecessor Cold War (via gamesindustry.biz) – and Cold War was already selling worse than 2019’s CoD hit Modern Warfare.

It was also a disappointing year for Warzone and its players. Little content, hardly any changes and even the new, large map Caldera did not bring the desired turnaround. Players even want the old map Verdansk back.

In addition, there were big problems with cheaters, as well as bugs in the games. – Season 2 was even postponed to give the developers 2 weeks more time to fix the biggest problems:

How will Call of Duty stop the trend? Although the financial report talks about the current games Vanguard and Warzone getting substantial updates in the first quarter, Activision is looking ahead:

• Development of the new premium CoD is progressing well
  • Planned is the successor to CoD MW 2019 – the most successful part of the series so far.
• Warzone: Mobile is coming
  • The battle royale should repeat the great success on mobile
• Warzone 2 to be unveiled later this year
  • The successor to the Battle Royale will be rebuilt from the ground up, with lots of innovations
• More staff for Activision
  • More people are being hired to create more content for all CoD titles

Call of Duty benefited greatly from rising player numbers during the Corona pandemic, but couldn’t sustain the run, losing about 50 million players in a year.

We’re also interested in your perspective from a gamer’s point of view: has Call of Duty’s content been less appealing to you over the past year? What would you like to see from the world’s biggest shooter franchise in the future?

Feel free to leave us a comment with your thoughts on the topic.

Would you rather find out about the current content of CoD, then check here: CoD Warzone: All info on the monster – Season 3 / 2022 – Release, Trailer & Content