Call of Duty has been the video-game industry’s dependable tidal wave for nearly two decades: a November release that swallows headlines, charts, and whatever goodwill developers can spare. In 2025 that tide receded. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 still sold well in absolute terms, but its reception and sales slipped enough that two very different rivals — Battlefield 6 and ARC Raiders — carved into the crown.
This wasn’t a single moment of failure. It was a collision of design choices, audience fatigue, smarter competitors and a gaming landscape that rewards novelty as much as loyalty.
The campaign nobody wanted to defend
Black Ops 7 launched with one controversial design decision that became shorthand for the game’s problems: the single-player campaign was online-only and lacked traditional mid-mission checkpoints. Lose power or internet connection? Back to the start. Players and critics noticed fast. Metacritic recorded the lowest user score in franchise history and the second-lowest critic score for a Call of Duty title. The campaign’s tone — hallucinatory, nostalgia-baiting and internally inconsistent — didn’t help, with many calling it incoherent rather than bold.
Multiplayer and Zombies largely worked; the core shooter still has polish. But polish can only paper over so many cracks. Market research from Circana showed full-game dollar sales for Black Ops 7 were down a double-digit percentage compared with Black Ops 6 during November — a striking number when you consider how reliably CoD has topped monthly sales for years. Even giving the game a week-long free trial did little to restore momentum.
If you want to see how the release was positioned on platforms, note that Black Ops 7 even appeared on subscription platforms at launch, joining lists like the November Xbox Game Pass wave (/news/xbox-game-pass-november-2025-wave-1). That kind of exposure helped, but it couldn't paper over the story players were telling.
Two very different challengers
Battlefield 6 and ARC Raiders did not arrive with identical strategies, but both exploited gaps Black Ops 7 left open.
Battlefield 6 leaned into what longtime fans wanted: big maps, destructible environments, vehicle combat and a return to a grounded, classic feel. DICE’s longer development cycle — and an iterative community program called Battlefield Labs that let players test and shape features early — helped refine the product before launch. Those moves paid off: Battlefield 6 received strong player and critic attention, and its post-launch modes (including free-to-play REDSEC) widened its reach. For practical context on how Battlefield has been tuning its systems post-launch, see recent changes in its challenge and casual mode structure (/news/battlefield-6-eases-challenges-adds-casual-mode).
ARC Raiders, by contrast, is a surprise star that shows how different mechanics and tone can topple incumbents. Embark Studios’ third-person extraction shooter combines PvPvE tension with an approachable progression model: you make real progress even when you die, so the game feels less punishing than extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov. That accessibility, plus cinematic emergent moments and a supportive online community, made ARC Raiders stream-friendly and broadly appealing. It’s the kind of title that draws viewers and converts them into players — and it walked away from the year with awards and buzz.
Fatigue, incrementalism, and the cost of an annual cadence
A big structural issue looms behind these product-level shifts: rhythm. Call of Duty’s annual release schedule used to be softened by a three-studio rotation, but recent years saw multiple entries staying inside the same Modern Warfare or Black Ops circles. The result: incremental changes felt incremental, not meaningful. When fans expect innovation and mostly get iteration, the goodwill bank runs dry.
That fatigue was compounded by a string of missteps — heavy-handed crossovers, perceived over-reliance on cosmetics, and campaign and live-service choices that alienated parts of the community. When a franchise’s familiar comforts start to feel formulaic, even competent multiplayer can’t fully compensate.
Activision noticed. Late in 2025 the publisher said it would avoid back-to-back releases within the same subseries, promising to chase “meaningful” innovation rather than incrementalism. Whether that pause will translate into higher-quality releases remains to be seen.
What the franchise needs now
Call of Duty isn’t about to vanish. It still has tens of millions of players and deep cultural roots. But recovery will require more than tweaks. A few practical directions stand out:
- Return to storytelling that respects players’ time and hardware realities — stop forcing always-online campaigns that punish glitches and outages.
- Prioritize foundational gameplay systems that can carry forward across cycles rather than transient gimmicks.
- Use longer development cycles for experimentation and community-driven testing, the way Battlefield made space to iterate.
- Keep monetization respectful of player investment — cosmetic stores are fine, pay-to-win is not.
There are encouraging early steps: teams have reintroduced player-requested features (such as optional Classic lobbies and SBMM tweaks), and leadership has publicly acknowledged the need for a change in cadence. Whether that acknowledgment becomes a sustained plan is the real story for 2026.
The wider market is changing, too
The ways people discover and stick with games are shifting. Extraction shooters, emergent PvPvE titles, and long-tail live services that build supportive communities can pull players away from legacy franchises. Streaming platforms amplify that effect — watchable, unpredictable sessions become free marketing.
If you’re thinking about hardware while you wait for the franchise to recalibrate, new console iterations matter for long-term play — some players are already eyeing next-gen upgrades like the PlayStation 5 Pro for smoother frame rates and performance (PlayStation 5 Pro available on Amazon). But hardware alone won’t change the conversation.
Call of Duty’s fall from an unassailable perch in 2025 is less an obituary and more a warning: dominance requires constant reinvention. The brand still has the tools and the audience to bounce back, but only if it treats innovation like a necessity, not an afterthought.
If you want a closer look at the two competitors that chipped away at Call of Duty’s lead, start with how ARC Raiders launched and won players over and how Battlefield recalibrated post-launch to be more welcoming to casual and veteran players alike (/news/battlefield-6-eases-challenges-adds-casual-mode).