A new Call of Duty has come out every fall for over 20 years. While still an annual best-seller, the franchise’s cultural cachet has shifted over the last 10 years. With the rise of live-service games, Call of Duty has become its own massive silo within the wider world of online multiplayer. Where new Call of Duty releases were once treated as tech-defining showcases, they now feel more like the arrival of a new Madden or NBA 2K. Activision chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl calls this the Call of Duty tax.
“We get the coverage,” he said in a new interview with The Game Business. “But we call it the Call of Duty tax, when we’re thinking about the reviews or the reception. There’s obviously a lot of fandom around indie games and excitement around new games popping up every day on Steam. And Call of Duty’s been here for a very long time, and with that people sometimes forget that there’s so much work that goes into making these games. There’s 4,500 employees here that are trying to make the best possible experience.”
Like each new annualized sports franchise release, which often reviews poorly but sells spectacularly, Call of Duty games rarely get scored well by critics these days. Once consistently in the high 70s and low 80s on Metacritic, the shooter series is now just as likely to appear in the mid-60s, a yellow-coded range that shouts “bad game” in a landscape saturated with amazing games. 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 bucked this trend with an 83. Last year’s sequel, Black Ops 7, was a 65. And 2023’s Modern Warfare 3, the game this year’s entry is a sequel to, sank to a franchise-low Metacritic score of 56 on PS5.
“We have 100 million free-to-play players, we’ve sold 500 million units, it’s one of the biggest franchises of all time, and we have a billion downloads on mobile,” Bahl said. “And so that huge audience, I think, sometimes, gets overlooked or just becomes status quo. There’s craft that goes into these games, and the dedication from the teams was something that we wanted to show this year with the marketing.”
But the Call of Duty tax isn’t just a vibes issue. Regardless of bored critics or the changing media landscape around live-service game releases, Call of Duty‘s struggles are showing up in the player numbers as well. The Game Business points to data estimates from Ampere Analysis that show a massive dip in monthly active users for Call of Duty since the launch of Black Ops 7. Over the summer, it sank to an estimated 20 million players, half of where it had been. The only thing that saved it was the surprise release of ports for Black Ops 1 and 2, a dose of nostalgia and a reminder of the good old days when Call of Duty was one of the top dogs, both commercially and culturally.
“It was not something that our community was looking for,” Bahl said on the topic of Black Ops 7. “They wanted something fresh, and even though there were different time settings, and ways to play the game with new features, that tonal shift is something that they were looking for. So, we’ve already stated that a future title is going to be a new sub-franchise and we’ve already laid the groundwork. But we’re really excited about Modern Warfare 4, and that addresses some of that feedback.”
The new Modern Warfare campaign goes live for players who purchase the early access edition starting October 16.