Guaranteeing access to the games of the Call of Duty franchise, one of the best-selling and most popular first-person shooter series worldwide, was one of the biggest bones of contention surrounding the acquisition of Call of Duty developer Activision Blizzard by tech conglomerate Microsoft. Now, a district court has rejected the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) appeal to its ruling that the deal can go ahead as planned. In turn, Microsoft set up a binding agreement with its biggest rival Sony to supply the latter's Playstation consoles with Call of Duty titles for the next ten years, even after Activision Blizzard becomes one of the numerous Microsoft-owned studios. Data by SteamCharts suggests that the impact of the shooter's current iteration, Modern Warfare 2 and its connected free-to-play Battle Royale title Warzone 2.0, on PC has declined rapidly since the beginning of 2023.
While the game saw record numbers of almost 500,000 peak and 224,000 average monthly player numbers in time for the release of Warzone 2.0 in November 2022, the player count has dropped steadily since then. The most significant drop happened between April and May 2023, with figures decreasing by 21 (average) and 30 (peak) percent. Since neither Microsoft nor Sony release usage figures for the games played on their consoles, it's hard to gauge interest in current Call of Duty titles across all platforms.
However, since Activision claims around 100 million monthly active players across all Activision titles in their latest quarterly report and current-gen consoles by Sony and Microsoft amount to a combined estimate of 60 million units sold, it's safe to assume that titles like Call of Duty: Mobile are the driving force behind the success of the series. Another piece of evidence for this theory can again be found in official figures from Activision. While monthly active users across all of the brand's titles stood at 36 million in the third quarter of 2019, this number jumped to 128 million in the following quarter. Call of Duty: Mobile was released on September 30, 2019, and in the first two months after its release alone, the game was downloaded 100 million times across Android and iOS, according to data provided by Appmagic.
