Summary
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Call of Duty on Steam has dropped to pre-Black Ops 6 numbers in just two months, indicating a significant drop in player numbers.
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Black Ops 6's peak player count has dropped to levels not seen since October 2024, with a drastic reduction compared to Modern Warfare 3.
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Black Ops 6's peak player count has dropped by 79 percent in just two months, indicating a rapid decline attributed to various issues such as microtransactions.
The spectacular fall of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 continues. Last week, we reported that Activision's latest title, which it described as “the most successful in the series' history,” had lost nearly half its players in two months, and the mass exodus appears to be showing no signs of slowing down.
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According to SteamDB, in just two months, Call of Duty is ahead of Black Ops 6 on Steam.
Modern Warfare took 3 years to drop to this low
Call of Duty on Steam, which includes Black Ops 6, Warzone and Modern Warfare 3, hit a peak of 66,349 players in 24 hours yesterday. You have to go all the way back to October 23, 2024 to find the last time it was this low. This was before the launch of Black Ops 6. Given that a percentage of those 66,000 players probably play Warzone or MW3, this is a damning indictment on Black Ops 6.
What's even more interesting is that it took almost a whole year for Modern Warfare 3 to drop as low as Black Ops 6 is right now. Modern Warfare 3 launched on November 10, 2023. It maintained an average peak player count of around 80,000 players for most of its lifecycle, dropping to a then-low 67,536 players on September 11th – still not as low as Black Ops 6 yesterday. To achieve this feat, you have to go all the way back to October 16 of last year, when the Call of Duty Steam launcher hit 62,982 players.
It's also worth noting that there were far fewer players to lose in Modern Warfare 3 than in Black Ops 6. The previous entry in the franchise peaked at around 191,000 players, while Black Ops 6 peaked at over 315,000. This means that Modern Warfare's peak dropped 67 percent from November 2023 to October 2024, but Black Ops 6 dropped 79 percent in just two months.
Peak Modern Warfare dropped 67 percent from November 2023 to October 2024, but Black Ops 6 dropped 79 percent in just two months.
It's fascinating to see how quickly sentiment has turned for this year's Call of Duty title.
It opened to enthusiastic critical reception, sitting at 83 on Opencritic, but sentiment quickly changed. Once again, skill-based matchmaking was one of the first issues to surface, but expensive microtransactions, boring events, and AI artwork likely played a role in Black Ops 6's downfall.
Forced to go thief. They hunted from within. This is Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
Developed by Treyarch and Raven, Black Ops 6 is a spy action thriller set in the early 1990s, a period of transition and upheaval in global politics, characterized by the end of the Cold War and the rise of the United States as the sole superpower. With a stunning narrative and unfettered rules of engagement, this is quintessential Black Ops.
Black Ops 6's campaign offers dynamic moment-to-moment gameplay that spans different game spaces with spectacular backdrops and action moments, high-stakes heists, and stealth-and-dagger espionage.
In a best-in-class multiplayer experience, players will test their skills on 16 new maps at launch, including 12 base 6v6 maps and 4 Strike maps that can be played 2v2 or 6v6.
Black Ops 6 also marks the epic return of Round-Based Zombies, a fan-favorite mode where players will take down hordes of the undead in two brand new maps at launch. After launch, players can look forward to even more exciting maps and game-changing multiplayer and zombie experiences.
