According to The Game Business, Call of Duty’s player count in March 2025 was 20.6 million. In comparison, there were 22.4 million in March 2023 and 20.8 million in March 2024.
The declining player count trend is concerning, and it also doesn’t help that even though the game is available on Game Pass, it is more popular on PlayStation.
The Game Business reported that Xbox was the most popular place for Call of Duty with Black Ops 6’s launch on Game Pass in November. However, PlayStation overtook the lead in March with 33% active players, while Xbox had 32.5%.
I never thought I'd see the day where Call of Duty is dying. What the fuck happened?
Just two more weeks
Is COD still popular with kids? I do not spend that much time around kids, but when I do, they are often talking about Fortnite or Roblox. Is the userbase just getting older and stopping playing the series?
No
omg only 20 million players. it's not enough. dead game!
Microsoft happened. They kill everything they touch lol
so they lost 10% from 2023 to 2024 and then about 1% from 2024 to 2025..... doesn't really sound very massive.
people don't like not stomping the enemy team
wow who would have thought playing one game and doing well then getting your shit stomped the next isn't fun.
SBM should have been a different queue.
I think it's just 35 year old millennials who can't let go.
Fortnite gets 100 million. CoD looks tiny in comparison.
People are just giving up on modern gaming. They're exhausted of live service, tired of being constantly bombarded with demands for more cash and willing to give up.
only 20.8 million players?? FLOPPA POST THE STEAMCHARTS RIGHT NOW
BLOPS6 is going to bundled in with the PS5 this summer that's going to boost the numbers.
But everyone knows GP is bad for business, most people dl a game and play for a session or two and delete them.
It's not a good deal for games that sell dlc daily
Can someone explain how this player drop is any different to the countless other player drops that each cod game gets around this time?
Yeah. I know part of it is just that I'm getting old. But, I don't even know who their target audience is anymore. It's not men. Indie games are the last bastion of potentially appealing games. I don't have time to waste on their antics where they keep trying to manipulate women into playing games (that they're never going to play anyway) by replacing masculine elements with faggotry.
20 million
100 million
I don’t believe any of these numbers honestly.
GP is bad for business
Who cares? It's not my business and it's a bargain for the time being. Fuck them. I just want to play games.
Game Pass was supposed to give it a giant boost that never happened.
SBM should have been a different queue.
SBM just needs to not fucking exist, its a shitty system that only makes sense to retarded rainbow haired cali dev fagots who genuinely think communism works
Video game subscriptions have been stagnate since 2021. As much as people keep saying that game pass is the best deal in gaming, they sure aren't showing support for it. For wanting companies to be more consumer friendly, they sure support the opposite at every turn. Complains about micro transactions; still around and profitable. Hate DRM; don't support gog and it's shown how horrible their quarterly earnings was for it Complain about game prices; still bought $100 5-day early access to Starfield and 10 million bought Monster Hunter Wild for $70 but now everyone just happens to be broke to buy new games at the same time? Either gamers are tsundere for bad practices or normies outnumber them but they seem the most vocal. I'm going to guess the latter.
Meanwhile Halo Infinite is actually dead.
constant FOMO not just for cosmetics, but for actual weapons, characters, items and mechanics
don't play now, you'll straight up never get some specific weapons and variants of them
mechanics have gotten dicey hectic crazy yet again to variable mixed reception, players can just dive/slide into rooms at any direction now and buzz people down
cosmetics hit a new peak of "we look at reddit and tiktok memes, lets kill someone with a unicorn" attempts at appealing to general audiences
yet again Call of Duty refuses to fix tickrates, netcode and other shit
matchmaking, like most other games out there, has hit a critical threshold of being so astronomically bad/fixed that it WILL give you several matches in a row of being wiped, before throwing you a pity match to feel good again, rinse and repeat
yearly exhaustion of a franchise that gets not only yet another gigantic new install size with every installment, but abandons every bit of progression and cosmetic shit you got last game so you have to start fresh again; what exceptions there were before have already been abandoned anyway
Warzone is so adderall bullshit especially with BO6 mechanics on top that it's basically unplayable now even despite them trying to go for nostalgia bucks with the original map from 2019
now people can just cash in for a monthly $20, get their fill and fuck off instead of $70 to the game itself
They're gonna need a shake up soon, because they've basically played themselves. Even diehards are getting tired of things.
didn't that warzone map bring people back, the devs were bragging about it on X, Funny if people left that quick
It's a walmart game like Madden. You see it on the shelf. You buy it. Simple as. Player counts are irrelevant for those game types. They still sell. And it's generational because each member of the family grew up watching older siblings play it. Then they start playing it, then their kids, etc.
microsoft buys actiblizz
sony owned journalism shits on cod now
lol
lmao
dropped from 20.8 to 20.6 million
its so fucking over
When your games cost $700,000,000 to make, yeah, that's kind of a big deal
Give your game away for """free""" with Game Pass
Numbers still drop
Yeah that's bad.
i bet theyve made it all back and then some
Maybe they got tired of playing the other 5 black ops games that are exactly the same?
people just dont want to download a 300GB game
obviously, but if that 'then some' isn't as much as the last game, shareholders will revolt.
why are these games so popular? they're so boring
One would have thinkened. Yet it didn't. But how such a thing is possible? It's literally impossible. Many people thinkening in the media told me it's impossible, they don't understand how it could be.
Even for modern COD BO6 really does suck, the multiplayer had no good maps, zombies was absolute dogshit, and the entire game is balanced around God awful Warzone. Got bored of it after a couple of weeks and haven't touched it since. The campaign was alright but also felt rushed and incomplete with a non-ending, and I abhor the MCU-ified overarching COD storylines at this point between both Black Ops and Modern Warfare. I don't see myself ever buying another game in this franchise again unless they drastically and completely overhaul the engine and gameplay.
The campaign was decent from what I played. If they could tone down the woke just a little more I might even be a fan.
You're right the zombies was fucking shit. Terrible.
NO REFUNDS
Because these FAGGOTS keep taking away Gun Game, the most fun mode of all. They bring it back for like 2 weeks and then it's gone again FUCK.
Back in the Black Ops 2 days, I would run CoD exclusively for that particular game mode most of the time. This rotational schedule is so gay.
It isn't. There's a new variable of Gamepass though.
It's the latter. There's also another wrinkle in that there's NUMBER of players and the spend. Gacha for example is optimized for maximum extraction from a very small amount of people.
i believe fortnite because my brother plays it and they have all these bullshit game modes and i'm pretty sure kids just treat it like club penguin or second life or something where they hop in fortnite, get on discord, and just chat with friends without really "playing" fortnite
so trying to beat fortnite with a game instead of a social hub is doomed to fail at this point
Your playerbase still contracting even a little bit after you effectively make the game F2P for Xbox and PC is pretty awful.
only 20 million active players
lol. oh no they're still only making billions from the franchise, its over