Call of Duty's untouchable presence on the market has yet to decline; in the last 12 months alone, the series has raked in a staggering $3 billion for publisher Activision Blizzard. Such success was, of course, brought about by last year's launch of Call of Duty: Mobile and this year's roll out of COD: Warzone and COD: Black Ops Cold War.
The introduction of new ways to play Call of Duty in the last year or so has evidently been an incredible boon for both the franchise and Activision. For instance, the series' battle royale experience, Warzone, and 2019's Modern Warfare have made a combined $500 million from microtransactions as of this past summer. Unsurprisingly, taking every other facet of the publisher's flagship series into consideration sees that already impressive figure rise considerably.
In a press release, Activision announced it is shifting the Call of Duty brand to a "shared ecosystem business model." Said ecosystem has seen Call of Duty make a whopping $3 billion in the past 12 months. This figure does not solely include game sales and in-game purchases. It also covers revenue brought in by merchandise, licensing fees, and publisher incentives. With regards to the franchise's performance year-over-year, net bookings - or revenue - has increased by a remarkable 80 percent. Game sales for the series went up during the same period, too, receiving a 40 percent year-on-year increase. And the playerbase continues to climb, with Activision reporting that more than 200 million people around the world played the shooter in 2020.
That Call of Duty's player-base and earnings remain on the rise is expected at this point. Within 24 hours of its launch earlier in the year, Warzone drew in six million players. In just over a week, Warzone's number of players ballooned to 30 million. The latest figure has the title sitting at about 85 million players worldwide. Given the recent release of Black Ops Cold War, Activision is undoubtedly experiencing yet another rise in concurrent players and user-spending.
Black Ops Cold War's launch hasn't been without its fair share of rough patches, though. Thus far, early growing pains have brought about a number of immersion-breaking bugs and console crashes. In addition, developer Treyarch informed fans that Season 1's content is no longer on track to launch as originally planned. Instead of rolling out the next phase of Call of Duty on December 10, Black Ops Cold War's and Warzone's Season 1 is being pushed to December 16.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
Source: Activision Blizzard