We are in a Video Game Crash, so wake up.
Today’s article is going to cover the latest crop of stories, where the game industry keeps “fucking around, and finding out.” We’ve been seeing crappy games for a while now. Everything from Fallout 76, Concord, to now Call of Duty. The Call of Duty (CoD) franchise has been on a downward spiral for a while now, I think that Call of Duty is the most resilient franchise the world has ever seen. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 sold so well, it broke Activision’s lifetime records for sales, profits, and user participation.
Call of Duty: Ghosts didn’t do so hot. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare sold better, but not enough to make a dent. Advanced Warfare was promoted as a “Xbox Exclusive” title. It was not exclusive to Xbox per-se, but it’s definitely the lead platform for the game, it was marketed by Microsoft in addition to Activision. Black Ops 3 sold pretty well, not overshadowing BO2, though. Then, Infinite Warfare was released, was met with immediate controversy starting from reveal, to launch. You’d think Activision would wisen up. Nope!
They didn’t. They released Call of Duty: WWII and sold modestly well is what I’ll say. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 sold kinda better, but lambasted for the lack of content. Still not learning the lesson. Black Ops 4 as a game from the gameplay perspective is not necessarily bad, but the spawns was so atrocious I dropped it. Like, imagine being spawn trapped every single match. Yeah. There’s no story mode. There’s no story to speak of, there’s playable characters, which gives each character a “training” mode for each character, the backstories are told by completing the training “levels.” You’ll learn more about the characters by checking their bios. That’s about as far the story goes. And then… Blackout. Zombies is typical zombies.
Call of Duty’s 2019 title is a Modern Warfare reboot, and has a love and hate relationship between fans and developers. Modern Warfare 2019 is for the most part a good game, but it had and has some issues. I’ll keep this short, and move on. Anyway: Modern Warfare 2019 removed some features from the game at the beginning, and people made their voices heard in backlash. Shortly thereafter, it was sort-of fixed. But as time progressed, what we know now as “SBMM” or “EOMM” caused lag frequently. Here’s my video where I talk about it…
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War sold pretty well, but it has this on-and-off indifference of opinion. Mixed reactions, sold kinda well. Call of Duty: Vanguard was panned at launch, and kinda sold well. You thought I was done? Nope… Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022) was released, and SBMM/EOMM hit hard on launch day, and fans were not liking it. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) sold a little better, and was also received a bit better. Problem still exists; SBMM/EOMM was still in place. And now for the grand finale: Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was panned at launch, sold pretty well, but bombed as soon as players figured out the issues. Black Ops 6 launched with glitches, bugs, issues, and they had the gall to turn SBMM/EOMM up. Still not learning their lessons. My point with all this is — Call of Duty has been in a downward spiral for years, and is shooting themselves on the foot constantly. But I maintain that this is the most resilient franchise ever made. No franchise has gone about 10 years of downward spirals, and survived two recessions back to back. The last franchise Activision let die, is Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero didn’t die a slow death, it only took a few bad releases to feel the pain.
Call of Duty is not the only franchise to take a hit, most games in the industry today are trying to chase the Fortnite niche. I wrote an article in 2022 about a possible Gaming Crash, and since then, it has been a little bit of silence for a while until the end of 2022 into 2023. It hit critical mass in 2024 where more studios started to close, more studios started to miss the mark. This is a on-going storyline, as of this writing. So, I took to YouTube to document this, and provide feedback to anyone who is interested in listening.
At this point, I talked about the price hikes. There are rumors that a $100 Video Game — not the collector’s edition, not the limited editions, not even the special editions. The base game is going to cost $100, and a lot of content creators had their own opinions about this. I did, too.
In this talk, I talk about a patent known as the Nemesis System, a mechanic in Shadow of Mordor, where they would recruit enemies as part of a tribal coalition. (Let’s say, your clan against another clan.)
That’ll be all for this talk for now… I’ll see you later.
