Call of Duty games have been bought half a billion times in 20 years

The release of the shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 became the most successful in the history of the franchise, strengthening its position in the game market. On the day of the launch, Activision representatives shared with The Washington Post journalists an impressive statistic: in 20 years, more than 500 million copies of the Call of Duty games have been sold. This figure puts the franchise on par with cult series such as Tetris and Pokemon, and second only to the Mario games.

Call of Duty senior vice president and general manager Matt Cox noted that Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard hasn’t changed the approach to game development. The whole process, as before, is carried out by 15 teams, which allows to preserve the original ideas and quality of the project. However, thanks to Microsoft’s resources, huge budgets are now allocated to marketing, which attracts even more attention to new releases.

On October 25, the new part of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was released on all platforms, including PC. The game has garnered a large following not only among console players but also among PC users, breaking into Steam’s top 10 most popular games with a peak online of over 306,000 players last weekend. While that total includes other games in the series, Black Ops 6’s multiplayer and zombies mode has gotten the most attention.

However, the game’s rating on Steam was only 58% positive reviews. The negative is related to problems in the launcher, disconnections that interrupt even the story campaign, and crashes. However, the campaign itself received positive reviews, with players calling it one of the best hours of the Cold War, noting its length as well. The multiplayer pleased with updated dynamics with the addition of jumps, tackles and tricks, as well as a well-thought-out design of network cards. The zombie mode was also liked by the players, adding new fortune telling. Visually, the game has not advanced compared to the previous parts, but this is compensated by low system requirements.

On Metacritic, Black Ops 6 already has a user rating of 77 on Xbox. Professional publications including IGN praised the single campaign and gave the game high marks, with IGN giving it a score of 9 out of 10.