Asmongold TV - They did it to themselves.. | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

They did it to themselves..Asmongold podcast for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. --------- ------------ Keywords: gaming content creator, mmo gaming, gaming culture, gaming podcast, online gaming Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So Call of Duty is dying. It's actually not dying. It's being killed by weird game design decisions, incompetent development, shitty storywriting. I have not heard a single good thing about the new Call of Duty game from anyone. Let me just say that. Not a single thing. They said that Call of Duty was too big to fail.

Famous Last Words the Tite. Every game is too big to fail until it fails. Tannick, if memory serves me right, and just like naming your game after. the Concord, you are setting yourself up for failure. Sure are. Doesn't that quote just define call of duty and Activision? The idea that they deserve success without trying, that they deserve your money without

earning it. They sure do. And to their surprise, it didn't work. Blackop 7 might be the worst performing call of duty in the history of the franchise. If the... So far. Trailers getting bombed with dislikes and, well, Well, so many more games actually being worth our money wasn't a sign of the times.

A 60 to 70% decline in sales and player counts will be the final nail in the coffin. Nobody has any idea how bad this is. What if I told you guys, Dragon Age the Veilgard did better. Guys, I don't know what to do. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. That's bad. is the most phoned in entry in the history of the franchise. They barely

took the time to scrub off the GROC logo from some of the call signs and calling cards delivering one of the most embarrassing campaigns I've ever seen for a first person shooter. And it's a game that ultimately could have been an expansion or a map pack, but oh man, we wouldn't be

able to charge $70 for that. $70. That's what I want to do. Is I want to talk about one of the most deserved failures in gaming history. Blackop 7 and the Call of Duty franchise. I want to talk about how this publisher has stripped mine their IP until there's nothing left and how I think they have backed themselves into a corner, they can't escape.

Because if Black Op 6 lost them $300 million and Black Op 7 is doing worse, I have the solution. Sell the brand to Saudi Arabia. Just sell the IP. to Saudi Arabia. It'll be fine. Oh no. The 10 cent? Yeah. Just get rid of it. But before that, a word from today's sponsor, StarForge Systems. Oh, how about that? Today's sponsored by StarForge Systems and their Black Friday sale is officially

live. If you guys have been waiting for the right moment to upgrade, this is the best chance that you're going to get. There's up to $1,000 off of everything on the website. And I'm actually just going to throw the script aside on this. I love my StarForge PC. They're so great. It's been incredible for me. These guys looked out for me when my PC went down without them. I wouldn't have been able to make videos. So true, guys. They've been great to me this entire time, and so is their PC. This is one of the highest quality PCs that I've ever had. It looks clean. It punches way way of its weight. It's the kind of hardware that you get once. Look at that. I think that's what a lot of people are looking for. So if you're thinking about getting a new setup or if you're just

waiting for the price to make sense, right now is the time. Check out Star Ford Systems and their Black Friday sale using the link in the description below. So I want to share something with really, really definitely great great advertisement there amazing tremendous you guys an experience that i had that i'm sure a lot of other people enjoyed something that i think honestly sums up both call of duty and just modern gaming as a whole at the exact same time after i downloaded black op seven this is how the timeline went open the game the game needs to now restart for an update loaded up again get dumped into a menu with every other call of duty stacked on top of each other like a graveyard of past mistakes then you have to log in get hit

with an ad to buy the game that I've already purchased, hunt down the actual Black Op 7 tile, play a cutscene, wait for the shaders to install because they can't be bothered to pre-lil- Look how bad the game looks. Look at the, this is pathetic. This looks terrible. Like, how do you do this? I don't even understand it. Three cod generations of shit, yes.

Those, now you're finally in Black Op 7. Oh, wait. Looks awful. campaign because they're not bothering to deliver a single player one play another cutscene get shoved into a matchmaking menu sign a code of conduct search for a match load the match play another cutscene 15 minutes it took me 15 minutes from install to actually touching gameplay in any other game i press play on steeman i'm in that menu in seconds but in call of duty every inch of friction is intentional they don't preload shaders they don't preload patches they push all of that to

the client because your inconvenience is they their workflow. They funnel you into their unified launcher to be able to blast you with ads, sales, battle passes, bundles, anything except the game that you paid for. The moment... So you get like three ads and you have to go through five loading screens just to log in. I launched Blackop 7. Oh God. Nothing was for me. Every second of it served them. My time, my convenience, my convenience. That's actually a really good way to look at it, is that, yes, these games serve the developer and the publisher more than the player. It's like whenever you buy something, you've just opted into another marketing scheme to buy something else.

That's it. Experience wasted for 15 minutes because the player's perspective isn't even in the room anymore. Now look, I am almost struggling to be able to find the words to tear this franchise. Just what we need. By the way, you just turn this one time and it goes all the way down. That's it. That's it. Oh, you have to turn this one, I guess too.

It's so fucking easy. how does anybody mess this up? Part partially because there is just... I swear to God, like fucking... Gotcha games have harder puzzles than this. So much wrong with it. And also because I'm just numb to it at this point, every conversation about this series...

These are mini-games that are designed for mentally ill middle school girls that don't know how to count. And now they're in call of duty. Ends with the same shrug. What do you expect? It's call of duty. It has become the poster child for everything that is broken in the games industry.

Pure creative bankruptcy, Trojan horse into a box release year after year solely to squeeze another quarter out of a fan base that they openly disrespect. A game made for one purpose. Revenue led by serpent-eyed executives who treat their audience

and their content creators like disposable marketing tools. We need you in Verdant's score better yet not allowing content creators to take a bathroom break because it might mess up their B roll And now he's a he's been waiting like 40 minutes ago The first thing is I think the first that told him Thought that this is the actual one is the thing Okay, I mean because it's a guy after you know I mean it has to be after I'm just speaking up for him

These guys don't even there's no way that's real like I'm gonna assume that that's It's like some sort of issue at the venue or something like that. There's no way that's real. Care about basic human dignity or health. Why would they care about your video game? This attitude, this open contempt for their own customers, bleed straight into Black Op 7. The campaign is just brain rot masquerading as a video game.

It feels pretty. Yeah, this is, again, this game looks like it is a, like a mod for an existing game. It doesn't even look like its own video game. edic and nonsensical with no real purpose. None of it connects because the people that were making it clearly didn't know what they were making in the first place. They're resurrecting long dead enemies, long dead allies, long dead plot lines, all because of some... Right.

Psychosis toxin that conveniently lets them hand wave anything that they couldn't write. The whole thing just devolves into you're literally just fighting your hallucinations because that's the only thing that their story had left. The game constantly blends the current timeline, with Mason's imagination, which turns into these pseudo-inception levels with zombies, flower monsters, and some of the most overcooked mechanics in the entire industry. And all of this is building towards these boss fights that are so tedious and repetitive that it almost feels like a prank. Shoot the glowing flowers so that you can deal damage.

Throw the giant machetes so you can deal damage. Repeat until you lose the will to continue. And just when you thought it couldn't get any more miserable, the game is forcing you into co-op where half of the lobby is going AFK at the first check. Wait, so people are just AFKing the campaign for the game that they spent $70 for? I mean, at what point do you realize that you may be messed up? This is crazy. It looks like a boring flop.

This looks like one's human. Well, here's what's funny is that you're talking about the second boss and one's human where you have to like destroy the three things and then he becomes active and you can shoot him. It's better than this. It is. It's better. This is crazy. and more of a shared suffering more than anything else.

Now, I could make the case, like a lot of other people, that at least the multiplayer in zombies modes are fine. The maps feel all right, even though half of them are just reneeded leftovers from earlier Black Ops and Modern Warfare games. I saw that Call Duty content creator Jay God replied to my post on Twitter after I gave an update on my experience. The game is asked.

He made concessions about the campaign, minimized it because it's only three hours, and said that multiplayer and zombies are good overall. And I get that perspective. But in that moment, I realized and replied, there are just better games to play than... Exactly. Like, why would you eat shit if you don't have to eat shit?

I feel like there are these people that are so locked in to playing these franchises that they just accept mediocre, like, 5 out of 10 gameplay and 5 out of 10 design phoning it in because they've just done it for 20 years. That's what I think really has happened. It's like the shit's a side dish Yeah, I don't get it guys I don't know anybody is Call of Duty Yeah, this is just nuts

Lining up to punch the ticket on another call I mean, even you compare this For a brain dead phone-in game Like you $70 for a brain-dead phone-in game That could have just been a map pack or an expansion Yep, that's about right $70 You just summed that Pokemon?

Yeah And it's like I guess I'll just say it. Like, I, I've saw some of these e-girls that are playing Pokemon Z-A, and I've seen their Twitter posts complaining about their boyfriend. It's like you just, you're very bad at making decisions about everything in your life, apparently. Your boyfriend's a retard, you're playing retarded games, you're screaming them. Like, at a certain point, you have to ask yourself, what am I doing wrong?

That could have just been another map act or an expansion. I could get... Somebody's got to say it. I could play this game. I could even have fun with my friends, but I am just sick and tired of wasting my time and money on games and companies that don't deserve it. I just don't really know why would I want to play this?

Like, I mean, Battlefield, I think, looks better and it plays better. It seems like the Ness is. And why would I not just play Battlefield? It's like way more interesting. I don't need to play their game. I'm over it. And judging by the numbers,

it looks like for the first time in franchise history, the players finally agree everyone is sick of call of duty man blackoff seven launched to a pitiful 87,000 concurrent players on steed what a flopperusky that is embarrassing that's bad guys

that's really bad yeah sure over the weekend it scraped its way up to 100,000 but you got I hope that they and this is what they should do they should take the studio that made this game and they should fire everybody it should just close the studio

shut it down send them to McDonald's do I understand it might be hard but you've got to take it out to the back of the barn you can't recover from something like this

remember that number reflects the call of duty launcher the unified launcher representing anybody that's playing every call of duty title that's inside of it including the free to play battle royale war zone

a launcher that before this game released was averaging around 37000 concurrent players So if you're doing the math, Blackop 7 only... Wait, oh yeah, you're right. So if Call of Duty is just like a aggregate, so this is including Warzone players? Oh my God.

So it's only half of this. That's only the amount of players on Steam. Most people play on console. Oh, yeah, yeah. Surely, surely the, like, the trend isn't the same, right? surely there isn't the exact same trend at about 50,000 see all of the time people that do this

you're coping you know you're coping I know you're coping and you know that I know you're coping just stop stop man get some help you don't have to do this to yourself

players on release day and maybe 70,000 players across the weekend that means this multi-million dollar blockbuster performed worse than Dragon Age the Vail Guard at launch. It actually flopped harder than Dragon Age. That is incredible. Wow.

And it's just, and here's what's crazy, is that they're adding in other numbers. So like, it hit like 80 something thousand or something like that. So it's like half of that. They had a free weekend too. I was going to play it, but then I remember Cod sucked for years, really. that sink in.

And guys, none of this should be shocking. Leading up to the launch of Blackop 7, every red flag was waving from the online discourse to the trailers being nuked with dislikes. Everybody thought this was going to be garbage. And also, I want to say that this is one more point on the graph that I have said before. There has never been a video game that has come out

that has received this much of an overwhelmingly negative reception that turned out to actually be a good video game that was financially successful. every single one of these video games, whether it's Diablo Immortal, Call of Duty, Dragon Age the Veilguard, Assassin's Creed Shadows, every single one of these games has been a tremendous fucking failure. And so if you see the reveal trailer of a video game that's bad, No Man Sky, No Man Sky, was very well hyped. People loved it. That's why everybody bought it at the beginning of the game. No Man Sky was a failure after launch. What I'm saying is that whenever you're coming into the release of a game and your released first impression is this bad,

you don't recover from that. That's it. And I have not seen it happen ever. That's it. Nope, you're wrong. Sean Murray lied. You're just retarded. You don't know how to listen.

That's fine. It's okay. I mean, it's just what happens, right? But anyway, yeah, this. is this is the way it is. ushing it off because Call of Duty always sells. Even Activision was leading into that delusion when they literally said that the franchise was too big to fail when they were.

Yeah, well, asked if they were worried about Battlefield 6. And now, well, they got a lot to worry about because if we compare this to Black Op 6's launch last year, that game peaked over 300,000 concurrent players, which means that black ops. So, wait a whole, just so I understand this. So the game had 300,000 players, and it looks like it was probably averaging somewhere,

if it's in between this. It probably averaged like 200,000 players realistically. So it sold less than half as many copies. Guys, somebody's going to McDonald's. Somebody is going to McDonald's. No man, this guy's different because it was hyped. I don't get Asmon's point on this. No, it's guy's different because it was hype for a bad release versus Black Ops,

it's not hyped versus but a bad release. No, what my example was that there are games that are very well liked and they release and they're problematic. But there has never been a game that has had a tremendously negative reception on its announcement. And then the game turned out to be a massive financial success or a critically acclaimed success by gamers. That's what my point is, that whenever, if you look at the first trailers for No Man Sky or anything else like that, it's really that simple. So it's just simple.

What is this here? Bad take? Actually, you know what? I'm just going to perm you. I'm just going to permit me. I don't want to argue. It's so obvious. People, like, it's really shocking how stupid some people are.

It's so obvious what I'm saying. Yep, you're getting paramed. Seven is down 60 to 70%. It's on game pass? Oh, it's on game pass. Just stop it. Do you want me to bring up Oblivion that's also on game pass? Do you want me to bring up Expedition 33 that's on game pass?

Just stop. Stop hitting yourself. The game is a massive failure. You are going to have... This is what's going to happen. This is what's going to happen. You're not going to like this. But when this studio gets shut down and they do layoffs,

we're going to go back and we're going to find all the people in this video that we're coping. And I'm going to find out where they're at now. I'm going to wait. I'm going to pull out every single one. We're going to write y'all's names down. Write y'all's names down. And that's what it's going to be. Powell World was on GamePass too.

People are just stupid. They're so stupid. It's scary. Why people use Game Pass as an example, they're dumb? Because they're stupid. Yeah, like, why does a dog do something? Because they're dumb. There's a dog.

As usual, you've got people that want to deny reality. The moment Steam charts come up, people suddenly say that the platform doesn't matter anymore. Uh, yeah. Ineatingly, that argument is always coming from people whose identity or oftentimes their income depends on call of duty succeeding every single time. It's a call of duty content.

It's the same thing with wild players, always sweeping, always making it sound like it's not falling apart. There it is. That's greater, some diehard fanboy that's pretending that the game is just being played everywhere else, but the biggest gaming platform in the world. They insist that everyone is using the dedicated launcher or they're playing on console,

but that excuse crumbles instantly. when you remember that the launcher hit almost 500,000 concurrent players the day it came to Steam, and Black Hop 6 hit over 300,000 players last year. You're trying so hard. You're trying so hard to hold on. And again, I will always have the last laugh with this because my viewpoint on this is grounded in reality. And reality and numbers and deadlines and most importantly, earnings calls are inevitable. And when that happens, you will see. All of these people will see.

I can't wait. I'm excited. Do not give us exact numbers, but they do give us exact trends. And that trend is not going up. It is falling off a cliff. It is massively failing. This game isn't selling. Players aren't showing up. And that the product is pathetic garbage isn't worth the money. That's right. That's the core of it. That is why this game is failing right now. What Black Op 7 offers barely even qualifies as DLC, let alone a full game. The only reason it's packaged this way is because it makes them more money, not because it's offering you anything more of value. Maybe that's worked for them in the

past. That's not working anymore. Players are waking up. Players are getting whiplash over the sheer number of genuinely good games that are dropping. Why is it that they can make arc raiders? and they can make like Expedition 33 they can make ball pit or a megabong or any of these other games but call of duty

can't make a good game what is it right now I don't know how anybody could keep supporting something this lazy when you have Battlefield 6 arc raters

or a whole wave of other games that are actually trying now I've seen some of the conversations about the game's use of AI and I think that this really comes to anybody gives a shit about

AI being used. Arc Raiders has AI and people play that. Nobody cares about AI. You know who cares about AI? Journalists care about AI. Real players don't give a fuck. And also these games have been using AI forever. This fake problem of AI is invented by people with followings on social media so they can

create an artificial hostility towards AI to scare companies into not firing them. that's the reason why it exists nobody actually cares about this nobody's going to really make a difference the reason why people don't like ai in some cases now is if the game's bad that's the reason why if the game is bad then that's the problem but there's plenty of games that use ai and they don't care like where wins me is another good example there's AI chat bots in that game did that stop it from getting over 150,000 190,000 players no it didn't so the truth is that a AI is not a real problem. It is an invented problem by critics and other people in media in order to make people believe something because AI is an existential threat to their career.

That's it. That's the only thing. Nobody actually cares. Is your house on fire? No. It's a candle. But it was raining. Down to what I've said 100 times by now.

It's about implementation and intention. A game like, like Arc Raiders that's using text to speech to be able to make the experience more immersive and accessible to give players more ways to communicate. That's done for the good of the game. That's for the good of the players. Call of Duty on the other hand, used AI to scrape studio Ghibli style grok images and shove them into achievements and micro transactions because they wanted to cut costs and make more money. It has nothing to do. Probably the only good decision they made with the experience. It has nothing to do with value.

It has everything to do with profit margins. And when you use tools like that to slowly cheapen your development, it doesn't just affect the AI generated art or those parts of the games. It infects the entire design philosophy. You can see it across. Should an AI generated the campaign. It would have been better. Every inch of Blackop 7, every corner cut, every asset that was reused,

every lazy decision that is shaped in this mindset that this product only needs to be just good enough to push another transaction. True. And that's the part that makes this entire thing. so embarrassing and pathetic to me. This is the biggest gaming company, the biggest gaming publisher in the entire world. Working on one of the biggest titles, one of the biggest franchises in the world.

These guys have generated billions of dollars in revenue. They've generated tons of fan support. They have 20 years of experience making these games. But it doesn't matter. And this is what you deliver. This is all you have in you? It's all you're willing to give. That's what this really comes down.

It is, guys. You have the money, you have the manpower, you have the experience, you have everything you could possibly need. But the only thing that you care about is extracting more money from your audience. Not the quality of the product, not my experience playing it, just getting to that next revenue cycle. Well, I'm glad it doesn't work. I can't wait to watch these people get fired.

I'm so excited. Like, the amount of people pushing out slop garbage content nowadays, it has to stop. It does. it has to stop. And the only way it'll stop is if these people keep getting fired. Like, you saw this with the Xbox Showcase. Like, we don't have any of these trash games in the Xbox Showcase anymore. The reason why is because gamers are speaking up, they're speaking out, and they're shitting on these games. They are. They're shitting on them. And I think this is an amazing thing. I really do. It's the executives, though. You're delusional if you think that it's just the

executives. You're totally delusional. The incompetence is all the way down. I guarantee it. Somebody upset that I didn't like the game. They said that I had made up my mind before I even pressed play. And they are absolutely right, right. Because these guys have been making the exact same. It's also that like, okay, so if you can't make a good first impression with your game and you give people the idea that your game looks like garbage, then I think that absolutely

matters. It 100% matters. So I see people saying like, oh, well, he already made up his. mind that he didn't really play it. Think about the fact that every single person that chooses not to play your game because of the way that it looks or some other variation of it, that's still a person that could have been a potential sale. Right? At the end of the day, like if you choose not to play a game, that's valid. It's totally valid. Game for 15 years. Am I supposed to have concessions for a company like this?

Am I supposed to make excuses or be understanding for the now You are if you're one of the people on Twitter. It's a trillion dollar company. I think not. How do you play this game? How do you buy this game with a straight face when you have seen just how many incredible games that we've had come out over the last year, over the last couple of years? You have Arc Raiders that is still continuing to just blow records and just shatter

through the ceiling of the industry right now. You have Battlefield 6 that is still stable. There's other games that are out there. the contrast between a good and a bad game has never been clearer than it is today. Never. And as crazy as it sounds, for me now, the user experience, the UX, if you will, is my divining rod for a lot of these games now. Yeah, if you get an ad before you can play the game, the game's probably going to be

garbage. Like, if you get a promotional thing for the battle pass before you can log in, the game's probably going to be a piece of shit. If I get in, if you are so lost in the I need to make money weeds that you need to set me through a 15-minute nothing experience, my needs, my perspective is not shared. Yeah. Or cared about.

This is only a vehicle for making revenue. It's just crappy, crappy design. And crappy, like, even you just look at the way the story was. It just looks like trash. Battlefield has it though Well yeah I mean that's it's definitely like Not every game that has it as bad

But every bad game probably does have it So it's one of these things where it's like Nothing is always accurate But something sure seem like it huh I think that this year has proven That's it That style of thinking That kind of game doesn't work

And I think that's the problem for Activision And I think it's an even I think it's an even bigger problem for Microsoft because they've built themselves to make games like that. Those are the kind of games that these guys are trying to make right now. And while I'm sure there's going to be a lot of Call of Duty... Microsoft needs to do what they should have done years ago and disband whatever the Halo Studio is,

disband 343, disband Trey Arc, get rid of these people, and hire completely new studios to make these games instead. Because it's very clear that these people are not good stewards of your intellectual property. They don't know how to make a good video game. They haven't been able to do it for 10 years. So why are you giving the money? Why are you paying their rent? What are you doing? So yeah, they did. Well, they did kind of with Halo, but like not really. Reform bungee. Yeah, that's what they got to do. Give gears war back to Epic. Yeah, exactly. There's legendary drops in chat. There it is. And so, yeah, Cod's biggest issue is the three studio set up. No, you're right.

because like they are rotating three like three studios rotate developing games and it's causing them issues too no there it is Microsoft should buy in C-Soft I feel like they should just get in C-Soft to make these games themselves right I mean anything would be would be better than this like you had people that work on halo that are talking about how they don't like guns like what are you doing at a certain point like I mean what a ridiculous what a ridiculous world to be in They're going to sit up and go, no, this game failing will wake the company up. The next thing will be better. I don't think you understand just how much of a failure this game is. And I don't think that it's one they're going to get away from.

And I don't think people understand just how bad it's going to get. Well, and there's another component to this too is that bad games and bad releases have a ripple effect that negatively affect the release that's after that game also. So like you can see this with POE leagues. that even if it's a really bad league, it will do very well if the previous league before that was very good. And if it's a bad league, you'll see that the league after that, even it's a very good league,

will not do very well. And that's really what happens is that people end up, like basically you train users to not consume the content because it's bad. These guys are cooked. Okay, now some of you guys are going to like this, but the longer that I look at the call duty numbers, the worst this picture gets.

And I don't just mean, oh, this isn't good. I mean industry shaking. Now, we've already established that this game saw a jump of about 50 to 70,000 concurrent players on Steam through the game's unified launcher. That is a 60 to 70% collapse compared to Black Op 6, which is over 300,000 players. And now that number has been confirmed even further by UK reporting a 61% decline in physical sales for this game's latest release. Now, yeah. Oh, guys, no, no, no, no. Actually, no, okay, so no, no, no, what you don't understand is that, okay.

Okay, so like every observable data point shows a tremendous decline, but every data point that you can't actually look at is in fact really good. Of course. Right? Obviously. Yeah, all the observable data is wrong and all the data in my mind is right. Of course. I understand that physical is dying, but when two metrics drop by the same margin, that's a pattern that is impossible. to ignore. But the part that

was dead three years ago. Like it was dead three years ago. The last one came out. The part that turns this from a bad year into a full-blown structural failure is what's happening behind the scenes financially. Last year Xbox reportedly lost $300 million in sales on Black Op 6 because the game went to

Game Pass. And I've seen some people trying to argue that this year... ...gave up 300 million. What was this here? Gave up 300 million called duty sales as a result of GamePass. Yeah, but I mean, how much money did they make is a result of the GamePass sales, right? I mean, this is the kind of stuff that's written by somebody who is a professional return. So if you just look at the opportunity cost of removing the sale and then looking at users, you're doing a number of, you're making a number of mistakes.

And this is the way that, see, people don't understand data and they don't understand the way that you look at numbers. So basically, the implication here is that every person that, theoretically maybe used or played black ops would have bought it if it wasn't on game pass this is a complete fallacy and anybody that knows anything knows that you use the same argument with piracy and it immediately goes into the garbage also you have to look at whenever you're getting a user into the game pass ecosystem you can't really like they're not going to be able to aggregate this out unless you have like the Microsoft back end analytics to the consumer behavior web that you create. So theoretically, if call of duty brings somebody into the game pass ecosystem,

and then that person spends $100 on another game or other microtransactions because they have game pass, well then actually, it looks like if you just look at this one individual transaction, that they're losing money, but in the aggregate, they're actually gaining money. And so this is the problem that a lot of these people have. This is the issue, is that they don't understand the way these companies. There's a reason why every single one of these companies are trying to create subscription-based ecosystems

with monetization in them. It's sad. It's really sad. Data analysts here, you're 100% right on all this, trying to explain this to people sucks, since many people aren't capable of grasping it. What's sad is that you have journalists that aren't capable of grasping it.

And worse than that, they're broadcasting it to the world. They don't know that it's so obvious. It's embarrassing. Y'all acting like people bought GamePass only for Call of Duty? Yeah, it's crazy. I don't know why people are against Game Pass. I think Game Pass, before the recent fucking price increase, which was ridiculous,

was actually amazing. And it still is, but it's just probably, I think it's too overpriced right now. But like, it's just crazy how dumb some people are, man. They're capable of grasping it. They wouldn't be journalists. Oh, shit. I didn't even think about that You just letting them know, huh?

I argue that this year's drop is explained by more players choosing to play on GamePass instead of buying the game, except for the fact that Game Pass hasn't grown. According to available data, it went from 34 million subscribers back in February of 2024 to 35 million this summer, a single million new subs, and that's before the big price increase that we had recently.

So even if, if every single one of those new subscribers, was a guaranteed full-price cod buyer. They weren't. It still wouldn't explain a 60 to 70% drop in sales, not even remote. Anybody using Game Pass? Like, these people are just retarded. Like, and again, like, you could do, like, a scientific paper that would explain how retarded they are,

and it would take a long time to figure out every way that they're retarded in. It would be like a 20-page paper minimum, maybe 40. guys this is a franchise that normally sells tens of millions of copies 20 30 even 40 million in some cases cold war one of the most hated call of duties ever still moved over 30 million copies back in 2020 when a series sits that high for that long any major dip is going to be dangerous but a collapse of this size dropping call of duty to maybe a 10 million or less unit sold game after two decades of dominance that's the kind of hit that destabilizes an entire publisher just looking at it's a It's not even just that. It's the fact that when it happens, it implies that it will continue to happen. Because having a one-off, like, a game that doesn't resonate that doesn't do very well, that's reasonable, right? Things happen. But the big problem is that now, now we have two games that didn't resonate.

Now we have a trend. That's what's scary. That's the big problem. Ubisoft, Activision has built their entire operational structure on the assumption that caused, of duty would always pump out blockbuster numbers. They have staff for it. They have budgeted for it. They have spent like their future is guaranteed. And now

the bottom just fell out. That's right. In an article from back in January this year, titled... He's comparing it to Ubisoft. I think that's extremely accurate. This is the same thing that happened to Assassin's Creed. Is that Assassin's Creed was supposed to be Ubisoft's get out of jail free card.

And apparently it just put them farther into jail. And that's why they stopped all their earnings reports, like they're going to have to sell this company. And it's basically just completely died. If Call of, if Assassin's Creed Shadows was a massive success, none of this would have happened. One point eight billion. That's without marketing. By the way, marketing for call of duty is probably hundreds of millions of dollars. Like the amount of money that they're spending on that is insane. Yeah, they're done, man. Yep.

Division almost spent $1.8 billion developing three Call of Duty titles. Chris Kerr writes, court filing spotted by game file, have revealed that Activision Blizzard has spent almost $1.8 billion developing three Call of Duty titles that went on to sell a combined 114 million units worldwide. Activision's current head of creative on the Call of Duty series, Patrick Kelly, disclosed the information to the court in California in December of 2024 in response to a lawsuit filed against the company last May. In doing so, he revealed that Call of Duty Black Ops 3 cost $450 million to develop across its life cycle. It went on to sell 43 million units after debuting in 2015. Call of Duty Modern Warfare was developed several years later to the tune of $640 million and sold 41 million copies. And you can see, right? 41, 30, the previous one was even worse.

The next one was even worse. And now you have this one that might only be at 10. like if I was an investor in that company, I'd be waking up at three in the morning. I'd be like, oh, fuck, bro, like, oh my God, I'm going to lose my ass on this. That's the way it goes. Did they count micro-transactions and DLCs?

Probably, yeah. I mean, if it's a court filing, there's probably a good chance they do. This is the real reason they're raising game prices, subsidizing their failures? Well, that's fine. I mean, I think it just accelerates the inevitability of AA studios and indie developers

being the main people that make video games because they're more dynamic, they're more agile, and they're more able to respond to community feedback, pressure, market demands, and design requests at a much faster ratio. It's that basically these people have spent all of their time developing these ships that are effectively the Titanic. And the problem is that they're, you know, they're sending these ships, right? They're sailing these ships. And they're fucking hitting icebergs and they can't turn around.

They can't turn away. And so what happens is that these companies are failing in slow motion and they can't stop themselves from failing. Whereas small companies can recalibrate, they can redesign, they can redo things. But these really big companies aren't able to do that. Yeah, they're unironically suffering from success. They've become, instead of too big to fail, they've become too big to succeed. And that's basically what's happened. Is it now they can't, they can't succeed because of how big they are.

how many different layers there are to every single thing. How can games be played if the leads aren't photorealistic? Exactly. Yeah. And you have these people that care about like photorealism inside of like graphics or something like that. None of that stuff really matters.

Much in 2019. 2020 release, Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War. Too big to maintain. Also incurred a development cost of $700 million across its entire life cycle and sold 30 million copies. It's important to reiterate that those figures encompass the lifetime development cost of each title, which often include

years of robust post-launch support. As noted by Game File, however, they do not include the marketing costs, which can represent a notable outlay in their own right. I would say each game probably had a marketing budget between $100 and $150 million. Maybe, actually, I'd say between $70 and $150 million. I don't know if I'd really say the bottom would be that high. But yeah, it's ridiculous, this ridiculous high ratio. Good Lord. I knew Activision spent. Most games, and this is true with like media too in general, is that sometimes media advertising budget is half of the budget of the product.

It's very common, or a third maybe. A lot of money on Call of Duty, but I would have never imagined it was anything close to this. The sheer waste and inefficiency here is unbelievable. No wonder these guys are gutting their studios laying off entire teams and shoving AI and every workflow they can because based on the numbers that were disclosed in court, and these have to be real because they're legal filings. If we adjust for inflation, there is a very real possibility that Blackop 7 costs anywhere in the neighborhood of Cold War's $700 million budget or maybe even pushing up towards $900 million.

And that's without marketing. Anyone who's paying attention to AAA budgets knows that marketing can easily run 25 to 100% of the development costs, sometimes even more. And Call of Duty is the most aggressively marketed game on Earth. Soda promotions, sports broadcast, TV shows. billboards, influencer campaigns, you name it. They blanket every single surface that they can afford. It is absolutely believable that the full spend here likely climbed into the billion dollar range,

maybe even more, and now they're watching that investment crater. So that means even if we're keeping it concerned. And assume that these guys were expecting around 20 million copies sold. That's roughly $900 million in revenue after platform cuts. If we average it at about $45 per copy, with a 60% sales collage. that falls to around $360 million. Fewer players also means fewer microtransaction buyers, so you're not going to get record-breaking cosmetic revenue

when 60% of your audience just vanished. How the hell are you going to make your money back when you just blew $700 million plus on a game? That's another really big component, is that if you can't bring players into the ecosystem, you can't sell them micro-transactions. Now, you do, like, one lucky thing that you have in that regard is that the most addicted players

will also be the one spending the most money. So you'll lose those micro-transaction sales at a lower ratio than you're losing players at just because of the innate nature of like the 80-20 rule. But at the end of the day, you're still losing a lot of money. And the next one comes out next year. They expect it was a fraction of that.

And they spent money like those billions were guaranteed. Now, some people are going to say, that's fine. They'll make it up next year. year, that thinking is exactly what got these guys where they are right now. A decade of... Somebody says you're wrong about why it failed, though. The campaign and zombies, remember the main attractor for the cod titles, it's because the multiplayer simply stucks. I'm going to pull you up. You're getting pulled up. Do you think that it was good for the game

the fact that the dislike ratio was so high? Do you think that was good whenever they showed the campaign and everybody disliked the game? Do you think that helped the game? Obviously not. Okay, so then when the track... trailer was about the campaign, then what does that tell you? So they have a campaign trailer that you said hurt the game because it was bad. But you're telling me the campaign doesn't have anything that has to do. It's not the main attractor. How do you explain the ratio of players?

How do you explain every single observable metric showing a massive decline? Black Offs 3 had really shit campaign and still loved by many? Okay. It's kind of right. most people play cod for the multiplayer. You're right. But here's the issue. Whenever you see the trailer for the game come out and the game is massively downvoted

and everybody says that it's bad, that creates a negative sentiment and a negative word of mouth that will cause the game to fail. Because now the, like basically the stereotype for this game is that it's bad. So while the campaign doesn't necessarily. matter if it's good. It does matter if it's bad. That's just what happens. Quality multiplayer has severely fallen off in years

because still-based matchmaking and AA anti-aliasing is shrink fission of the maps making the gameplay loop really stale. You could be right about that, sure. Greed and arrogance that is locked Activision into a release schedule that leaves no room to be able to improve anything. I've talked to Activision and Call of Duty developers.

These guys have been saying for years now that they need time. Time to work on the engine. Time to improve the anti-cheat. Time to actually This is what Rich said in chat too, is that one of the big reasons why these games keep failing is because they keep trying to go after this model where they're releasing every three years. So like the game, it's not based around what the game needs. It's based around an arbitrary time frame that the game needs to be released under. That's a big issue too.

It's basically you're setting the company up for failing. Build something meaningful, but they don't get that time. They are chained to a one-year treadmill. that is designed to refresh these war zone guns, these cosmetics, these battle passes, and that $70 ticket price every single fall. And the next call of duty, it's already deep in production. Nearing the finish line.

There is no space to pivot, no bandwidth to reinvent anything, and no chance that whatever... I was saying before about like the boat gets too big, and you can't stop hitting the iceberg. Small changes that they try to make now is going to undo the damage. They have built a machine that only moves in one direction. And the moment that that direction stops being profitable, the whole thing is just going to fall on top of them.

And even if Activision wanted to fix any of this, there's a bigger problem for them. Players just don't care anymore. Any changes that they could make now wouldn't even move the needle for a franchise that most people are burnt out on. This is another thing that a lot of studios don't understand is that they don't understand the dishonest illogical biases that consumers have and how much a negative or a bad video game will affect those bias. biases. And this is the problem. It's like it's very hard to quantify this or to understand it unless you have like a deep insight into it. But the big issue is that a lot of times consumers do not behave and buy things logically. They do it based off of what they see, what they hear, etc. So as soon as you create a negative sentiment for your brand in a public space, sometimes you begin a death spiral. And I think this happens with streamers, right? I mean, I think this is a it's a microcosm of it. But it happens with streamers. It happens with games.

Happens with celebrities. Where, like, as soon as people start to hate someone, then it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and more extreme. Vibe Purchasing? Yeah, exactly. Think about how many people bought Expedition 33, probably because they only heard really good things about it. Of course.

These games every single year. A lot of players are just exhausted from buying the same game every year. It barely makes sense for sports titles. It makes even less sense for a first-person shooter. $70 or more, depending on where you live, that is a lot of money to keep dropping on something that hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade. And the truth is more simple than anything. Players just have better options nowadays.

Battlefield 6 finally gave a reason for its community to come back to it. Arc Raiders is well supported and still growing to this day. More shooters are on the way. And with independent studios delivering real value at a fraction of the price, who's to say that the next big FPS game doesn't come from a team of five people that are selling their game for $10? Well, look at Fortnite, for example. I mean, obviously it was made by Epic, but, like, the quality of the game, like, it played very well, but it didn't have, like, voice acting or anything like that.

Like, many times very successful games don't follow these principles that developers think that they have to. Yeah, Megabunk FPS. Exactly. Yeah, they don't have to do this. Like, these are things that people inside of the gaming industry invent as, like, kind of these, like, standards. but the players don't respect or care about these standards. It's just something that people in the gaming industry hold each other to. Now, this is not the end of their problems because Microsoft and Xbox have built a structure where they can't fix any of this.

They've locked themselves into one-year release cycles. They've chained their entire ecosystem to Call of Duty's revenue. Well, they could. They could change it. And eventually, I think that they will. If they keep pumping out failures that are not financially successful, you can't be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Like, that just can't happen for very long. Like, even at a place like Microsoft,

ultimately, like, even if they could afford it, why would they want to? And I think that's what's going to happen. Then they turned Activision into Xbox's single biggest financial pillar the moment that acquisition closed. Xbox's content and services revenue jumped by 61% overnight because Activision Blizzard became their entire revenue engine outside of GamePass.

And with GamePass already losing money, now Call of Duty is losing money. What happens? when both pillars crack at the same time. Now, let's zoom out for a second. Uh-oh. Name an Xbox title this year that actually sold outside of the Oblivion remake. I was about to say the Oblivion remake.

Bowed didn't. Out of Worlds 2 didn't. Doom didn't. I'm sure there's a bunch more that I can't remember, but they likely don't even matter in the first place. Every major Xbox release has underperformed. And this franchise, this multi-billion dollar juggernaut, was supposed to keep the roof held up. Instead, it's collapsing faster than everything else they own.

Yep. Now layer on top of that, the cost cutting, the layoffs, the AI infrastructure, the shrinking talent pool across every studio they control. Not a good time. They're not investing in people. They're not investing in craft. They're not pretending anymore. Their entire strategy is cost reduction by any means necessary and improving their games isn't anywhere in the plan. It's collateral damage. I don't think that they can. If you want my honest opinion, I think that the people that are making these games are totally incompetent and they don't know what they're doing. Like even in terms of like story decisions, they make mistakes. Like I, I don't think that like it's an issue where it's like, oh, well, if they had more time

to make the game, it would be good. I don't think that's, I don't think that's true. And I think until they realize that, I mean, a lot of, and this is the thing is like a lot of like developers, people on Twitter, et cetera, always say that, oh, well, they didn't have enough time. Well, that doesn't really matter in a lot of cases, right? I mean, how much time would it have taken you to figure out that it was a bad idea to have you go and fight some guy in like some dreamland and then fight some giant version of like a guy in the story and slamming his fists down like you're like you're playing doom or something like that like you i mean do you really need more time like three years isn't enough time for you to figure out that was a bad decision so really i think

that you should look at the development studio and the decisions that they make inside of the campaign and then see that as a microcosm for their decision making process is that is that It's very clearly flawed. And you could say that maybe if you give them more time, it would have been better. But if you gave a better studio, the same amount of time, it would have been even better than that. And if you gave the other studio more time, like think about it. It's like a 2x multiplier versus like a 50x multiplier. Like that's really what's happening here.

It all comes down to hiring. Yeah, of course. Given their current position, this is where the wheels fall off. if this game continues to perform as poorly as it has out of the gate, it is going to shake this industry to its core. It's going to prove that there is no such thing as predictable revenue streams in the games industry. And as a result, as a consequence of that, it's going to break apart this AAA hegemony. It's going to make investors very, very nervous.

And they're already nervous looking at Ubisoft and how that company fell apart. But I think it's going to prove it's going to wake up a lot of these people to the realization that this is a creative industry first and foremost. And if your effort isn't going into that And your effort is instead going into I don't know Trying to turn it into a factory Sollessly mine some of these IPs You're going to be met with catastrophic failure

Eventually you will Maybe it might not be immediately But it'll definitely happen in the future And it's going to be too And this is a thing Is sometimes they'll release something That's kind of mediocre And it will do well financially

But they don't realize the brand withdrawal That they've made from their goodwill And how that's going to negatively affect the future of their sales. The tunes of billions of dollars in the case of Activision and Call of Duty. I think that it would be different if we could have a conversation that, oh, well, Xbox will just give them more time. We know that's not going to be the case because Microsoft has already come forward saying

that they're demanding a 30% profit margin from all of their studios. And that's just not. Time for gotcha and God. That's not going to work in this situation. Yeah. And on top of that, who are we kidding? name a single studio that has actually improved under Xbox's control post-acquisition. I think every single one of them have lost reputation, have lost talent, have lost sales, have lost just about everything.

Even just recognition. Most people don't even know some of these games anymore. And Xbox has released so many games this year, and I think the only one out of all of them that actually succeeded or that was actually profitable was the Oblivion remake. Yeah, the only game that they sold that did well was a game that was made 20 years ago. And again, that was the third-party company that made that. That wasn't one of their studio. Yeah, a third-party company does a remake of a game that you didn't own 20 years ago, and that's your big winner.

Not so good, huh? This is the most deserved downfall in the history of video games. These guys have been exploiting their games and their audiences for so long, and they've gone unopposed in a lot of cases. I think a lot of people just kind of assumed that call of duty would always sell. The people would just buy the slop, eat the slop pigs. It's the silent audience, the mythical silent audience that's out there. And also like the insult to that, by the way.

Oh, there's a bunch of people out there that are really stupid and don't know anything and they'll buy it anyway. Oh, really? Wow. What a great way to look at your consumers. It's not happening anymore. That's great. I think that there's just too many games. that have been coming out.

Exactly. One, too ridiculous. Games are far too expensive. And there's just such a contrast between how great some of these games are versus some of these other games that we're seeing. There is such a massive contrast

between what you've always been getting and what you never get. It's never been more clear than it is today. I think this is it for them. I really do not see a way out of this. I think they could do one more. Something that makes this entire situation even worse. Other than that, yeah.

Is that this is not a shot against anybody. please do not take offense to this if you are a call of duty content creator. But every single person that I saw that was talking about how call duty is actually good and the numbers are alive. Don't pay attention to steam charts. I'd click on them. I'd see, oh, you're a call duty content creator. I'd go and look at their profile

or go look at their YouTube channel. And these guys have lost 90% of their viewership over the past five years. The same thing that's happened to call of duty is happening to call of duty already happened with World of Warcraft is that during Legion and during BFA when myself and a lot of other creators

were talking about like, you know, this game needs to change. It's losing its audience. People are not watching the content anymore. It's not as popular as it used to be. People are losing interest, etc. We were met with just like people weren't taking us seriously. They were saying, oh, the sub numbers are great. Everything's fine.

But if you look at the amount of people that are actually consuming content for World of Warcraft, right? You actually look at the user experience and the users that are actually playing the game. It's extremely minimal. And you're seeing more and more people quitting the game. and you're seeing more people choosing not to watch content for the game. And I think that's a really, really, really bad one. And the same thing is happening again.

Staggering. And I'm talking guys that were getting 1 million views, 500,000 views on every single upload that drop down to like 10 or 20K views. Jesus. That's not you. That's bad. That's the game. That is a consequence if you tying your career to a game,

I'm not going to tell you. He's right 100%. It's the truth of this case, but that shows people aren't watching the content. If people aren't... I think it's all due to the political environment with the wokeness and DEI, the stuff gets into company culture as well, which manager is going to tell the blue-haired new hire, it's a bad idea to risk your job otherwise.

I think you're right. I think that woke DEI hiring policies have absolutely infected these companies with talentless, worthless garbage developers and people that are involved in these games, and they have made the games worse. I think they've absolutely infected these games like a cancer. And yeah, 100%. And you see this, like, for example, like you have like a character in Black Op 7

that's like this like female character and she's like really buff and she's not really attractive. Who is that for? Fundamentally. Who is that character for? Who wants to see that? I'll tell you for a fact. The players of Call of Duty don't want to see that.

And also, by the way, there will be some women that like the virtue signal about how beautiful like other women like this look. Just wait to see how many girls actually cosplay that character. Women want to cosplay and look like characters that are attractive. Now, they'll pay lip service to talking and telling the fat girl that she's beautiful. But if you tell her that she looks like the fat girl, she'll block you. The fact is that characters and designs like that appeal to no one. nobody wants to see that nobody has any investment

in this like the fable main character is another great example nobody wanted to see this nobody wanted this so if I see this in a video game it shows that there are people that are making this game that don't care what the players want fundamentally those people are afraid to go to HR

yeah and there's a there's a culture of toxic positivity that surrounds it where a lot of these developers and people that work at these companies do you want to risk your job by saying that the, you know, non-traditionally attractive minority female character isn't something that will be good for the game sales? Do you want to risk your job for that? No, you don't. So what happens is that you have a culture of toxic positivity that continues, yet you still talk about? Of course I do, because it's not, it's not completely dead yet.

It's dying and it's almost dead, but these big companies haven't realized it yet. So you know what, Femboy emcee is not this? Yes, exactly, right? And so nobody wants to. And so nobody wants to to see this kind of content and whenever I see it in a video game, I automatically assume the game is garbage. Like the same as they have like that other female main character that looks like Shadowheart after she hit the wall. Nobody wants to look at that. Why would somebody want to see that? It's gross. So you're putting characters into the story that have no appeal to anybody that's an audience of the player. Really? Like, I mean, that's it. So why are you putting this in the game? Watching the content and they're not playing the game. And if they're not playing the game, they're just not interested in it.

And the faster that moves, especially seeing how massive of a decline that is over just five years, I don't see how people are going to be interested in this game. And once you lose that interest, it's real hard to get back. Exactly. Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed the video. I know that I did.

If you guys did enjoy the video, like the video, subscribe to the channel, share it with your friends, share it on social media. Get me those nice, beautiful engagements. I need that on this channel. Believe me, before I turn into one of the Call of Duty content creator.

I'm just kidding. That's bad. Oh, real bad. Stay cool. You don't want to be like that. I keep doing this. Follow me on Twitch, follow me on Twitter.

Follow me on kick. Stay cool. Stay right. Just stay safe. I'll catch you guys to the next one. Peace. All right. Family.

Man. What a fucking video. What a fucking video. I'll link it to you guys. I wanted to watch this today. and I wanted to focus on it and get into it because I am very glad to see what's happened with Call of Duty and I think that it will continue to happening

to other games as well that followed down the same route and thanks for watching. Yeah, it was a great video. If Legendary Jobs is still in chat, he's a great guy. I like him a lot. I've watched this videos for a long time and I'm very, very lucky that we have guys like him that are making these videos talking about these issues.

This video is doing so well too. 468,000 views. That's nuts in two days. That's really fucking good. And so I'll link it to you guys. Make sure to give it a like. Give them a sub if you haven't already. And I think it's great. And so yeah, solid fucking video. Absolutely solid fucking video. There's a video right there. Give it a like. And yeah, there you go. You see a Chuck Schumer bill? I didn't see that at all. And yeah, there it is. Look at the comments of Actman's Twitter. There's a number of cod content creators in there defending cod. Wait, really? Let me see. What's he saying? Act man. All right, where's he at? What's he doing? To everyone defending Black Op 7, you need to stop.

Stop. Get some help.