Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 hasn't really set the world on fire since its release last month, launching to rather lukewarm reviews and being poorly received by a fan base that seems to have had enough. It's been widely reported that Black Ops 7 is struggling commercially compared to the rest of the series (and its main competition), and Activision is trying to lure people in with free skins.
With things looking pretty bleak, it fell after the start of Season 1 to get things back on track. Live service games like Black Ops 7 pretty much always see a big spike in players at the start of each season, right? This is a chance to bring people back, get the game back on track and try to keep the rookies as long as possible, right?
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Season 1 failed to increase player count
Apparently not. If you look at Black Ops 7's SteamDB player counts before and after Season 1 launched, you'll see that it only managed to bring in a few thousand players at most. On December 3rd, one day before the season release, Black Ops 7 managed to reach its peak player count of 57,331.
Today, one day after the season started, Black Ops 7 only managed to reach the maximum number of 62,229 players, an increase of about five thousand players. Sure, that's a lot of people, but compared to other games, and even other Call of Duty titles, that's an absolutely tiny increase for what was billed as one of the biggest season launches the series has ever seen.
Black Ops 7 is the worst user-rated Call of Duty, falling behind Modern Warfare 3
Black Ops 7 is tied with DS spin-off Modern Warfare 3: Defiance as the lowest-rated Call of Duty in the series' history.
We'll use Marvel Rivals as an example. Before the release of Season 5 on November 14th, Marvel Rivals managed to reach a peak player count of 93,170, but that number increased dramatically after Season 5 started, rising to a whopping 160,144 the day after it started. That's a more typical player growth for a live service game, but Black Ops 7 didn't experience anything close to those levels.
Steam numbers aren't everything, of course, and Black Ops 7 is free-to-play on Xbox thanks to being on Game Pass, but player numbers across platforms are usually correlative. A drop on Steam most likely means drops on PlayStation and Xbox as well, and unfortunately for Activision, it paints a pretty grim picture – people just aren't interested in Black Ops 7.
