Call of Duty: Vanguard’s misfire shows in Activision’s 28% player drop

Activision Blizzard’s revenue performance continues to slide as Microsoft works through its $68.7 billion deal to bring the mega publisher aboard Xbox’s campus next year. Activision’s Monday report on the decrease in player engagement may prove to be more alarming for both of these companies.

Activision and others used monthly active users as success indicators while keeping sales secret. They have fallen to their lowest total number since 2019’s fall. Call of Duty Mobile launched. They’re 94 million this year, down 28% from the 127 million in June 2021.

Refer to Duty call Mobile raised the monthly active users figure, coming from Activision’s half of the business, to 128 million in the quarter after it launched, up from 36 million in the preceding quarter.

Reading between the lines, the slide in player engagement since March 2021’s peak of 150 million monthly active users suggests last fall’s underwhelming tentpole Vanguard: Call of DutyEven if they are not at fault for the fall, those numbers may have been cannibalized. Call of Duty Warzone Or MobileBoth have proven to be more popular.

Activision in its annual report on April 30 — having not held an investor call since Microsoft announced the purchase on Jan. 18 — said Vanguard “didn’t meet our expectations, we believe primarily due to our own execution. The game’s World War II setting didn’t resonate with some of our community, and we didn’t deliver as much innovation in the premium game as we would have liked.”

Another indication Vanguard was a commercial as well as a critical disappointment, FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, which launched Feb. 25, was the NPD Group’s top-selling U.S. title for the preceding 12 months as of May 13, surprising fans and observers who had come to expect Call of Duty in the top spot for the better part of 10 years.

Activision, in Monday’s statement, said that Vanguard: Call of Duty And Warzone had improved some compared to the previous quarter, but that Call of Duty’s contribution to the company’s bottom line was still down year over year. At the very least Call of Duty Mobile’s performance held steady.

Blizzard’s launch of free to-play Diablo Immortal With just one month left in the last quarter, this contributed to Blizzard’s 27 million monthly active users. That’s up 4% year over year, and a 23% jump from the previous quarter — although that was a record low for Blizzard since the company started reporting these figures back in 2016.

Blizzard’s revenues slipped 7% from what they were at this point last year; it faced a tough comparison to a 2021 quarter when it launched World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic.