Overall: 9.6
CoD4 is the best in a long and storied franchise. This is next-gen gaming in every sense of the phrase. This is an excellent game.
A new Call of Duty game that isn't Modern Warfare 4 may be coming, and the surprise re-emergence of Warzone Mobile could be crucial to it.
Microsoft reportedly lost over $300 million in Xbox and PC sales by putting Call of Duty on Game Pass, raising concerns over the subscription model’s long-term impact.
There are some reports that in March 2023, Microsoft told a court, "Game Pass prices will not increase as a result of the [Microsoft-Activision] Merger."
If true, massive hypocrite .
If this one franchise is the reason for the game pass price increases, then just leave it off game pass and not make people who don't play COD foot the bill for a game they will never play, like me.
Talk about stupid business decisions.
Honestly fuck em dude, they are constantly trying to monopolize the industry instead of just competing.
Exactly. Keep putting their regular games on GPU day one but big budget games that are very popular like COD should not release on GPU day one, maybe 9 months or a year later once they profit from sales.
I don't know if this is a stupid decision. Hear me out. I saw someone comment that it was time to cancel GP and MS would do a 180 like usual. It may be too late this time. It's the history of those other 180s that gives me some doubts about them doing it again or this being a stupid decision versus a cold calculation.
Despite never being the dominant brand, Xbox has at various times tried to push wildly unpopular changes on their customers when they thought they were in a position to get away with it. The 180s came because they overplayed their hand. Customers had options. They lost customers to PS because of the Xbox One launch plans. Anyone who moved to PS4 and stopped gaming on Xbox was a total loss for Xbox.
Customers still have options. The problem for GP subscribers is that most of those options are better for MS than continuing to offer GP as it was before and at the old pricing. Their fans cheered on their acquisitions. Some petitioned regulatory authorities to let the ABK merger happen. Congrats. They are now a dominant 3rd party publisher. Those other options gamers could threaten them with before now work to Xbox's favor.
Other than quitting their games entirely, which now includes ABK, Bethesda, and whatever else they gobbled up, what are upset GP subscribers going to do about it? You can suck it up and eat the price hike. They win. You can cancel GP and buy Xbox games instead. They come out ahead. You can switch to PS, Nintendo, or Steam. So? You'll be paying more for their games their than you were paying for GP, and are they really that committed to continuing to manufacture hardware (in the traditional sense) anyway?
Edit: Making matters worse is that this is likely being driven by pressure from MS, which has increased scrutiny of Xbox since the ABK acquisition.
The price would have increased anyway, which was already planned, with or without COD. They didn't lie about anything. You just misunderstood the answer.
@maximusprime:” There are some reports that in March 2023, Microsoft told a court, "Game Pass prices will not increase as a result of the [Microsoft-Activision] Merger."
If true, massive hypocrite .“
.
.
The problem is that you can buy a bakery and tell the community you won’t raise the prices because of the purchase then turn around and raise the prices then say it’s because the ingredients prices when up and be technically telling the truth.
.
Unless the courts would had a agreement in paper that the prices wouldn’t go up for example 5 years there’s no way to enforce it
Edited for typos
If this is true, this might be a case of taking a big risk gone wrong.
Is that why they always say revenue and not profit??
My question is, even though they lost 300 million in sales, were they able to offset it.
We might never know.
I don't know about you all, but, while that is a lot of money, that's less than I would expect. The totality of game pass users on two platforms playing Call of Duty results in just 300M?
Am I crazy to say that feels like an unusually low amount of revenue?
It is but for pc gamepass only works on the Microsoft store. Majority of pc gamers don't use any other storefront other than steam. So they wouldn't of sold much on the Microsoft store anyways.
That leaves Xbox one and Xbox Series. $300m does seem low.
Well, being that Microsoft is the lowest out of the platforms that sell the game..
Buying Activision, in long term, made up the loss of game sales of said game. By a mile.
But, being cod is tanking as of right now, will be interesting to see if Microsoft can actually save a franchise rather than destroy it.
They just raised the price of GamePass knowing they would piss off their customers.
You now know - they didn't offset it.
I’ve been saying for years, you just can’t trust MS period.
1 simple rule, don’t trust MS, act accordingly.
The price would have increased anyway, which was already planned, with or without COD. They didn't lie about anything. You just misunderstood the answer.
Which is an even bigger reason as to why you can't trust them, they play with semantics instead of being honest and straight forward. Your comment doesnt help their case by putting the blame on the consumer for what and how they said what they said.
Good, I had hoped Microsoft would be better for Activision and Blizzard than Kotick running the show but that would be expecting Microsoft to be competent at managing studios.
In honour of PlayStation's 30th birthday yesterday in the US, data company Circana has dug out figures showing the top 20 best-selling PlayStation video games ever (date-range Jan 1995 to July 2025). Don't get too excited.
This is a great reminder of how game sales have become more concentrated in a smaller number of games/series over time. In the PS1/PS2 era a game was a success if it sold a million or a few million copies. The GTA games (3/Vice City/San Andreas) were pretty big outliers in selling as much as they did during the PS2 era. So in the minds of a lot of gamers something like FF VII feels like it was as big of a PS1 game as God of War 2018 was for PS4, but in reality far fewer people bought it (though it has obviously reached additional people through remasters, etc.).
What this says to me is, not many people are buying a PS to play PS exclusives. Like so many false narratives, like Xbox gamers don't buy games! It seems Playstation as a default system is a vanilla system to play call of duty, Minecraft, GTA games and a sports games.
if you look back into the PS history, it has always been the 3rd parties who sells the most games. it was just that the PS1 and PS2 were so dominant that many of those 3rd party games were exclusives. so, back during the PS1 and PS2 days, the strategy was "to sell as many consoles as possible in order to sell more 1st party exclusives" to ride on that wave. The strategy to push many 1st party exclusives to sell consoles only started with the PS3 when many of those prior 3rd party exclusives went multiplat but more accurately, it started with the PSP.
Sony saw with the PSP, which was being trounced in sales by the DS, that 3rd party exclusives are hard to come by if you're not dominating the market. So they started building more 1st party games and when the PS3 were facing difficulties in sales, they knew they had to rely on their own to differentiate the PS3 from the 360. So the strategy back then changed to "release more 1st party exclusives in order to sell more consoles".
the only manufacturer that is still consistently selling their hardware to play 1st party exclusives, is Nintendo, and that was because they gave up the armrace for power thus they can't rely on 3rd parties anymore as all multiplats play better on competing consoles. AND that's also why they are the most ominous in going after emulators and also patent trolling!
so, you're not wrong there, but not an "aha!" moment or anything. it has been this way since the last, at least, 15 years for Playstation.
@zerobalance
So... what this tells you is that Call of duty, being the absolute check writer that it is, has been outsold by Last of us, God of war, 2 Spider man games..... Saying Playstation exclusives doesn't sell is like saying call of duty doesn't sell because they have outsold some of iterations. Does that make sense to you?
meh, too bad. I was looking forward to a fight.
Can't wait to get this.
finally devs are getting it right.. go ps3.. Game daily said the same thing awhile back..
9,6 > Ps3
9,5 > Box
straight up in the airs :-)
Best on PS3.