Black Ops 7 markedly underperforms as sales and player count tumble

[DragonSlayer101]

Facepalm: Black Ops 7 launched to significant hype among Call of Duty fans earlier this year, but things have gone downhill since. According to a new report, the game has been losing momentum in recent weeks, with both sales and player counts dropping sharply compared to last year's Black Ops 6.

According to data shared by Alinea Analytics with GamesIndustry.biz, the latest title in the CoD franchise sold only 401,000 copies on Steam in its first 26 days – an 82 percent drop from Black Ops 6's 2.3 million sales over the same period last year.

Even more concerning, Black Ops 7 has been steadily losing its active player base. According to Video Game Insights, the game's peak daily concurrent player numbers during its launch period are significantly lower than those of Black Ops 6 in 2024 and Modern Warfare 2 in 2022.

The data further suggests that the number of daily active players across the overall CoD franchise on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox fell to 18 million last month, a 50 percent decline from the 36 million recorded by Black Ops 6 in December 2024.

Steam statistics also appear to support these findings. According to the platform, Black Ops 7's concurrent player count sits between 50,000 and 100,000 – a steep drop from the roughly 300,000 concurrent Black Ops 6 players during the same period last year. It also represents an 80 percent decline from the post-Covid peak of Modern Warfare 2.

Activision has acknowledged that Black Ops 7 sales fell short of expectations and has promised to implement several changes to improve gameplay and reduce player fatigue. As part of this effort, the company says it will no longer release back-to-back Modern Warfare or Black Ops sequels, following two consecutive Modern Warfare launches in 2022 and 2023 and two Black Ops releases in 2024 and 2025.

Activision also outlined several immediate steps to make Black Ops 7 more accessible to players. To start, the company will offer free trials for both the multiplayer and Zombies modes next week, allowing players to "experience the game firsthand." Additionally, Activision has committed to providing "unprecedented season support" in an effort to improve the game's reception and rebuild momentum among the player base.

Image credit: Video Game Insights

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Black Ops 7 markedly underperforms as sales and player count tumble

 

[Neatfeatguy]

Next CoD should be titled:

Call of Doody: CB (Code Brown)

Object of this game is that you just had a wonderful meal out with your date and about half way home you realize you need a bathroom RIGHT NOW! You need to start storming convenient stores and construction sites to utilize the bathrooms, but if you can't obtain the bathroom key or get past security before your time runs out you're going to be in for a big surprise as you drop your dirty bomb in public, killing millions! Can you be the hero that the people need you to be? Can you defuse that dirty bomb before it drops?

These game companies that have a solid IP seem to think they can keep building on top of it and they'll maintain that high return in sales forever. I honestly didn't know they had 6 Black Ops games until I read news that 7 was dropping soon. I knew there were 3, I have an unopened physical copy of the third one still....but now there are 7?

 

[CapNemo72]

It makes perfect sense.

There are now even more games to be played, BF6 came really strong this year ( probably the main competitor). As for sales, everyone having Xbox Ultimate Gamepass is NOT buying the game.

And COD is VERY heavy on your disk space. The whole thing takes more than 200Gb!
I played it just to see, than simply uninstall since it was taking too much space. Have big game backlog.

 

[Billybobjoey]

I thought BO7 was fine. Campaign wasn't my favorite but it was better than some of the recent years. Multiplayer is fine, it's CoD MP. I will say having back to back entries in the same subseries sucks and I'm glad they're changing that, heck just quit doing these sequels after a certain point, 7 entries in one subseries doesn't need to happen. Quit doing them yearly while you're at it, give them an extra year and I guarantee they'll start being received a lot better again.

 

[bviktor]

Is there ANY franchise that MS didn't turn into sh*t?

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Who knew that the uninspired garbage story that takes 15 minutes of launchers and ads and cutscenes to get going, full of AI assets and awful writing, along the same uninspired multiplayer they have been recycling so long it can almost drink, wouldn't sell well and was underperforming?

Oh wait, all of us did, because we have functioning brains. The moment Activision came out and started releasing cope statements about how the game was totally doing well on gamepass but nowhere else it was obvious the game was a flop. BO6 didnt do great either, and all of its problems are worse here.

The community has been voicing their concern for years and they've been summarily ignored. They're YOUR CUSTOMERS! Ignore them long enough and they will move on. Both Microsoft and Activision really struggle with this idea, the era of corpos abusing customers and them asking for more ended with the Red Lung.

Is there ANY franchise that MS didn't turn into sh*t?

Viva pinata, by the sheer coincidence of not making more games in the series.

 

[Robertrogue]

The first installments were fabulous. All the way to the first BO. Then it has been mitigated disasters of junk. Too many patches and updates that take up several hard drives to hold and take forever to load, then when it does load, it has some glitch and is nearly unplayable. I enjoyed the classic historical COD's that had a great campaign and decent MP. The most fun I can remember is the first version had mods that people built and those MP games were actually fun!!

 

[AlexIL]

Why rising prices for hardware and software while keeping salaries at same level comes as a surprise at sales of everything?
Making uninspiring games also doesn’t help much. I got rid of PS5 last year by finally being fed up with woke illogical overpriced garbage being shoved to me marketed as “games”.

 

[Megalomaniac]

This is the corner you paint yourself into when you go for annual releases. BO7 is trash.

Battlefield 6 returned to form and is a solid shooter that feels more like CoD than CoD does.

 

[toooooot]

Expectable.

 

[Liljonny11]

Black Ops 7 is one of the best releases in terms of technical aspect in a while. Persistent lobbies, non MMR playlists, and better class systems.
The idea was to actually listen to their audience. They did a great job in ONLY that part and completely forgot about game modes. They removed 4 games modes that everyone loved. Headquarters, Kill Order, Control, and Ground war were by far the most popular objective based game modes and they got rid of all of them. The game is BORING, every game mode is basic as hell. It's like they completely forgot about them.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

It was bound to happen eventually.

Ubisoft and Activision bet on their big properties being annual/biannual releases like sports games but sports games have a real life team and licensing and stuff built into the annual releases.

CoD is just another shooter in a sea of shooters and the plot is getting old now.

 

[Jarenien]

CoD and BF games died a decade ago, about time to just put these archaic games to pasture and #shock come up with a new IP instead of milking the dead cow.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

CoD and BF games died a decade ago, about time to just put these archaic games to pasture and #shock come up with a new IP instead of milking the dead cow.

LOL no.

Battlefield 6 sold 7 million copies in 3 days, becoming the best selling FPS game in 2025 and the best selling battlefield game in history.

That dead cow is awfully lively.

Even COD still has a large audience. Slow down the releases, take some time to actually fix the games problems, and put out a good set of maps (and stop banning people constantly) and the numbers will come back in full force. If BO7 was as good as the original, it would have sold gangbusters.

 

[ferrellsl]

So, due to all the problems they're renaming the game to Black Oops.

 

[m3diapers]

Thanks to its un-diverse, 100%DEI, dev team

 

[Rapob]

Same formula for years with no issue but this year we got BF6, which is highly popular

Alot of people who normally would have bought COD, bought BF this time

COD just needs to step up their game for next year, lets get some 2025+ worthy graphics for a start