Activision Blizzard recently revealed that the Call of Duty franchise has generated more than $3 billion over the course of its lifetime to date, with huge year-over-year growth and a continually expanding playerbase.
The hotly anticipated launch of Black Ops Cold War and the continued rousing success of Warzone were key factors, with other products in the IP helping to bolster numbers. The shared ecosystem business model, as the company calls it, is cited as one of the main reasons for this high number.
Call of Duty has been consistently successful for well over a decade now, and is a household name in the mainstream. Even so, 2020 managed to deliver an 80% increase year over year in revenue and a 40% increase in unit sales - at least this year isn't a damned dumpster fire for everyone!
Black Ops Cold War enjoyed a record breaking launch and according to Activision this November saw the highest number of unique players across all platforms, as well as the highest number of hours played in the entirety of Call of Duty history.
Engagement driven by the free to play content of Call of Duty: Warzone, backed up by paid microtransactions as a form of monetization, has opened up the franchise to millions of new customers. Warzone's continued success no doubt helped boost Cold War's launch sales, and with Activision maintaining content support we'd hazard a guess that it will grow even larger.
Riding this wave, Season 1 of Black Ops Cold War and Warzone will deliver a massive amount of free content on the 16th of December.
While the year is coming to a close, the holiday season is just beginning in earnest. We imagine Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will move a huge amount of copies before 2021 rolls around and even further increasing these record shattering numbers, allowing Activision to start the new year on a strong foot.
We do wonder if these impressive earnings will translate into benefits for the developers and employees, or is it just an even bigger bonus for the execs?