Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 currently has less wishlists on Steam than the Palworld dating sim. It’s ranked 173rd as of writing, behind the Killer Bean game at 73rd, and the Gothic remake in 17th place. Battlefield 6 seems to be hogging the spotlight right now, and with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 set to come out in roughly two weeks, should Treyarch and Activision Blizzard be worried?
Well, one thing is for certain, Call of Duty hasn’t had this much competition in a while. The obvious challenger is Battlefield 6, which not only is easily outperforming any other entry in the series in over a decade, but has outright fired shots at Call of Duty’s recent tendency to focus on celebrity over realistic modern military aesthetics.
We’ve already seen some drastic shifts from the standard Call of Duty strategy. The game is cutting off some of the gaudier cosmetics available in previous games, resigning them only to Warzone while keeping the newest iteration of multiplayer rooted in the expected setting. Would this have happened if Battlefield wasn’t speaking directly to the FPS crowd? Maybe, maybe not – but it seems the competition to the FPS throne has caused the needle move for the CoD franchise to some degree. Is that why we’re seeing the CoD franchise so far down the wishlists on Steam?
Battlefield 6’s success is one factor, but elsewhere we’re seeing less direct competitors, such as Arc Raiders, which looks to be an exceptional release in the extraction shooter scene. Regardless of how things play out, Call of Duty hasn’t had such a contested release for years. Such are the dangers of sitting on the throne for too long.
However, even when online sentiment seems stacked against Call of Duty, there are several factors to why Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 may not be popping off too much on Steam ahead of its release. For one, between 2018 and 2022, Activision has been selling Call of Duty titles on Battle.net, which previously was home to just Blizzard games. This ended up being a bad move for Call of Duty‘s PC performance, but it’s entirely possible that a portion of PC players learned to see Battlenet as the go-to platform for the series.
Then there’s the Microsoft Store on PC, another alternative to Steam that isn’t nearly as popular. Nonetheless, Microsoft made a real effort to push Call of Duty on Game Pass (both for console and PC) with Black Ops 6, breaking records for the service as a result. Black Ops 7 is releasing on Game Pass day one next month, which could certainly account for a sizeable portion of the PC playerbase.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that Call of Duty has always had a strong foothold on consoles. On day four of the FTC vs Microsoft hearing, former Activision Blizzard King CEO Bobby Kotick stated that only 25% of Call of Duty daily active players were on PC, based on 70m daily active users. It’s worth noting that 51% of that figure would be attributed to Call of Duty Mobile, and that these are stats for Call of Duty in general, not just the latest mainline Call of Duty release. Regardless, PC is a sizeable slice of the overall playerbase, but a big slice either way.
With all this in mind, what does this say for Call of Duty right now? Black Ops 7 will, in all likelihood, still sell like hot chocolate on a cold day. Perhaps these early indicators of Steam interest (or lack thereof) hints at the consequences years of varying PC storefront strategies can have on early adoption on the platform, rather than some drastic fumble from the FPS giant.
Or maybe it’s one small crack in faded armour. Time will ultimately tell if Call of Duty manages to maintain its stranglehold on the genre it’s dominated for so long (as well as the fall season, in general), or whether Battlefield 6 and other big releases can capitalise on a general fatigue within the FPS genre to really mix up the shooter space in a meaningful way.
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