War zone
Activision is starting to tease the new Call of Duty, purportedly called Black Ops: Cold War, with some weird Xbox Store listings that may be an ARG or an accident, I’m still not sure. But I think this is the longest time we’ve spent without knowing what the new Call of Duty will be this fall, and it’s a strange year for several reasons.
The first one obviously is COVID, which has derailed everything and removed the E3 news cycle where we would normally have heard about the new Call of Duty, most likely. The second is the fact that this new Black Ops game was a bit tricky, after the original Sledgehammer game was scrapped and they were assigned to help Treyarch make another new Black Ops game a year earlier. This reinforces the point that, despite trying to be on a three-year cycle, Call of Duty really only has two successful sub-franchises, Modern Warfare and Black Ops.
But now there’s another key in the works, Call of Duty Warzone, which has been a huge hit in its own right, and yet a free battle royale was something Activision was hesitant to try for a while. Mainly because of how the annual fall release could potentially impact. But now we’re in that situation, and I’m wondering if Warzone will help or hurt Black Ops: Cold War this fall.
Certainly Warzone, now essentially a permanent item in Call of Duty, which won’t be phased out like Blackout, can be used to promote Black Ops. We’ve already seen some taunts in Warzone that seem to point to Russian Cold War-like nuclear phone messages and codes and possibly hidden submarines. So it’s free marketing in the form of a complete literal game.
War zone
I hope the cross promotion goes much deeper than that, as Warzone will certainly get Black Ops: Cold War operators and weapons once it is activated. The implication is that Warzone will continue to exist alongside any new Call of Duty that exists, and may even continue to share progress with it, as we are seeing now with Modern Warfare.
And yet there is the obvious problem. If Warzone is the game that most Call of Duty players want to play on top of the traditional campaign / multiplayer / zombie structure of a full $ 60 fall release, will it affect sales?
I think the answer, to some extent, should be yes. By definition, if Warzone players can get a Black Ops “upgrade” of the mode, that’s enough to get them what they already love without bothering to pay for a new game.
And yet I’m not sure how much matters in the end.
Call of Duty is still such a strong franchise, the best-selling game of the year, every year there is no new Grand Theft Auto, so you can certainly afford sales dips. And beyond that, Warzone may be free to play, but it’s absolutely a source of revenue anyway. Warzone seasons last around two months, and the battle pass costs $ 10. That’s $ 60 a year right there from Warzone, plus any money players can spend on operators and blueprints and so on. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see that Activision earns a lot more than it loses, even if Warzone diverts some box sales from a game like Cold War. Warzone was absolutely the right move for the market, and in fact it may be the last truly successful battle royale that we see in space.
Call of Duty is immortal, but what appears to be a franchise has irrevocably changed with Warzone. I am looking forward to seeing how it will unfold this fall.
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