There is no other way to put it, 2021 was a bad year for Activision Blizzard. Naturally, the negative image that the company suffered throughout 2021 (and continues to) was going to affect its games. For example, even though Call of Duty: Vanguard was still one of the best-selling games of the year, there was a steep drop-off in sales from Sledgehammer Games' return at the helm compared to Treyarch's Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War from 2020. In addition, Activision Blizzard's latest earnings call suggests that Blizzard lost a substantial amount of users across all its games.
According to Blizzard's Monthly Active Users (MAU) stats from the company's Q4 earnings call, Blizzard lost a whopping 5 million users in 2021. What's surprising is that the drop-off happened even though Blizzard released games such as Diablo 2 Resurrected, World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic as well as World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. In total, the MAUs of Activision Blizzard across the board went from 435 million at the start of 2021 to 371 million once the year ended.
Many have been quick to blame World of Warcraft's lack of engaging content as part of the reason for the decline. In particular, fans pointed out that Shadowlands failed to live up to the expectations. However, World of Warcraft is still Blizzard's biggest seller. Most likely, a significant portion of the drop-off comes from Blizzard's other games such as Overwatch.