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Call of Duty is essentially dead on PC right now

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G

Grief.exe

Member
The game is currently on a deep discount and a free weekend, with a banner on the top of the front page, clearly advertising the availability of both.



The game is currently struggling to break into the top 15 of the top sellers on Steam and the top 30 on the concurrent players chart. This is very surprising considering the game is free to download and play currently.
For comparison, last weekend saw a free weekend for both Company of Heroes and Red Orchestra 2, both managed to break into the top 15 concurrent players.
I've been following the game since release, and it has consistently been struggling to crack the top 30 despite Activision's most aggressive price reduction to date.



Comparing the CoD release numbers, each subsequent game has lost, on average, of 27,000 concurrent players at launch. If the trend continues for Advanced Warfare, then the game will launch with abysmal numbers <10K concurrent.

Each Call of Duty release is split into different executable, which could stretch the data. I compared each multiplayer version to keep the data as consistent as possible, and verified the single player executable numbers were very similar.



Comparing the peak values in concurrent players for various Steam releases.

  • Black Ops (November 2010) - 118,000
  • Portal 2 (April 2011) - 100,000
  • Skyrim (November 2011) - 287,000
  • Modern Warfare 3 (November 2011) - 86,000
  • Borderlands 2 (Spetember 2012) - 123,000
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops II (November 2012) - 64,000
  • Call of Duty: Ghosts (November 2013) - 37,000
  • Dark Souls II (April 2014) - 80,000
 
T

Tensketch

Member
well in the UK they're still trying to sell each game for like £30 each when you can walk into your local game store and pick each of them up second hand for like £5-10 each.

I've been wanting the BLOPS games but they wont do them for a price I want. I may just get them on Xbox for so much cheaper.
 
B

bigkrev

Member
Aren't all of the shooters ahead of it (except for Arma, which I'm guessing is actually Day Z?) Free to Play?
 
N

Nokterian

Member
Only thing that keeps a float is Black Ops 2. Just because treyarch knows how to do a proper pc port and it's more fun then that mess of Ghosts never will be but yeah it's dead all right since CS:GO is dominating since Activision didn't give any attention to PC gamers in general after MW1.
 
R

Rodney McKay

Member
I'm still waiting for Black Ops ONE to get a decent sale.
$30 on sale for a game that old just doesn't fly for me.

Out of the huge amount of Steam games I have, I don't think I've bought a single COD game yet.
 
P

Pudge

Member
The prices have been aggressive for Activision, but compared to most other publisher sales, they're still pretty weak. Combine that with all the F2P stuff available that is taking away from CoD's younger skewing audience that might have access to a PC, and I'm not surprised at all.
 
S

sunnz

Member
COD is one of the games were discounts are literally nothing.

MW1 is still £15 for fucks sake.

£7.50 and I would get it, just for the SP.

ghost 25gb...
 
S

Silky

Banned
Kareha said:
There are better FPS on PC, plain and simple.
Click to expand...

It's moreso the competitve prices the games sell for. Why would someone buy a game with a yearly release schedule for full price when you can get a dedicated shooter experience for 75% less, as well as cheaper expansion packs for the game?

I would never buy a CoD game on PC. Unless I got it for dirt cheap. It's just not worth the investment.
 
N

Nonentity

Member
The Call of Duty series is still my preferred pick-up-and-play shooter on PC, simply due to the fact that there is less reliance on teams and large-scale battles.

That being said, Ghosts was a TERRIBLE game on PC. There's a reason why Black Ops 2 continues to have a higher player count than Ghosts on PC, it was actually a competent and reliable port.

Ghosts = piss poor performance even on high end PCs, no ping counter, no FOV slider at launch, no dedicated servers (they claimed there was for 'major cities' or whatever, but it's super easy to tell in a killcam on a game-to-game basis how dramatically the latency differs).

Black Ops 2 = great performance, good PC options (fov slider, support for high refresh rates, etc.), and actual dedicated servers.

Now, I tend to prefer some aspects of the Infinity Ward games (I like the feel of the guns in Ghosts more than in Black Ops 2), but the fact that everything else was bad absolutely ruined it.
 
S

supersaw

Member
RiccochetJ said:
Am I seeing this right? BO 2 has a larger active player base than Ghosts right now?
Click to expand...

Since IW removed dedicated servers in MW2 their CODs have been declining in popularity (locked fov and other crap). Treyarch's PC ports at least tried to cater to the audience a bit.
 
D

draetenth

Member
Personally, I only buy COD to play single player so I don't care about this free weekend. Plus, given how COD seems to place less emphasis on single player and more on multi player means I don't think the price is right.

The last COD I bought was Modern Warfare 2 and iirc Modern Warfare 3 was the one with the really short single player mode so stopped buying COD games at that point. I won't buy another COD until they get to ~ $20-25. Modern Warfare 3 is at $29.99 (25%), but if it goes to 50% I might buy it.

How are the single player campaigns for Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops, Black Ops 2, and Ghost? How long are they supposed to be?
 
P

ponpo

( ≖‿≖)
They need to start providing 200 dollar knife camo skins to be as popular as Counter Strike ( &#8790;&#8255;&#8790;)
 
blazeuk

blazeuk

Member
They never drop in price on PC, this big sale of theirs has them down by 25% which is about as much as they ever drop by. There's not much point going the PC route when you can pick up older CoD titles on consoles for next to nothing. It's still no doubt on the decline though but the PC market is just a different audience than they're targeting now so they're probably not all that bothered.
 
G

Grief.exe

Member
GhostTrick said:
25% isnt what a call a deep discount.
Plus those games are reamly expensive.
Click to expand...

The discount is currently 33%, but that point is made completely irrelevant by the use of launch numbers in the argument.

The game is also completely free to download and play at this point, you would think that would inflate users a substantial degree. Historical precedent in the past would show this as the case too.

RiccochetJ said:
Am I seeing this right? BO 2 has a larger active player base than Ghosts right now?
Click to expand...

Yes, has essentially been that way since launch.

bigkrev said:
Aren't all of the shooters ahead of it (except for Arma, which I'm guessing is actually Day Z?) Free to Play?
Click to expand...

No on all counts.

Arma 3 listing is not DayZ, the original mod was eventually ported to the game.

Counter-Strike: GO
Garry's Mod
DayZ
Counter-Strike
Arma 3
Rust
Counter-Strike: Source
L4D2
Arma 2
Payday 2
Red Orchestra 2

Are all shooters that are ahead of Ghosts on the concurrent list and are all available for purchase currently in the store.
 
xBladeM6x

xBladeM6x

Member
Still enough to keep a constant community. You only need so many before it's just diminishing returns on population and how much of it you'll end up playing with / against. If you mean that it's low on population in terms of staying power among PC gamers, then yeah, it's because they're typically poor ports on a platform that has far better FPS games.
 
C

ComputerMKII

Banned
Good riddance. Ghosts was an abomination, straight-out unplayable (and I enjoyed all the previous CoDs since Call of Duty 4, to varying degrees)
 
D

Dr Dogg

Member
Actually what could be interesting is comparing other free to play weekend numbers with the previous ones that CoD has had relevant to the other big name games. Saints Row IV for example I think got 40,000+ people playing during it's weekend whilst this is the second one Ghosts has had this year and it can't even muster 10,000.
 
Hip Hop

Hip Hop

Member
Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku! said:
The MW2 dedicated server boycott is finally having an effect
Click to expand...

I can't forgive Infinity Ward.

Modern Warfare 2 is one of the greatest FPS of all time, to this day, not many can rival it if you want that classic Deathmatch.

If they would have given us dedicated servers like COD 4 has, all the stupid bullshit and perks would have been moved out by the community, It would have been a classic.
 
K

kuYuri

Member
CoD's tend to have bad PC ports, plus there are a wealth of F2P or cheaper options for PC gamers. Combine that with the annualization of the series and Activision's general unpopularity among people who game and you've got yourself an unpopular series of games.
 
X

XPE

Member
Lets face it the specs for Ghost done it no favours on the PC, personally I cant finish the game because it keeps crashing at the same point.
 
Coulomb_Barrier

Coulomb_Barrier

Member
Why a PC gamer would want to play a console-orientated mp fps like COD when there is so much else (and better) available is beyond me, so no surprise.

With Destiny out before, and other games around the same time the new one is released, I can see the decline continuing.
 
D

Dysun

Member
Ghosts is the worst Call of Duty since it got big, so the tepid reception is no surprise. Being a terribly optimized port doesn't help matters
 
A

akaoni

Banned
This is actually the second free period for Ghosts, don't remember that happening for any of the previous titles.
 
M

MehsterChief

Member
Steam's fps community is dominated by Valve games. Great support, constant discounts, working on a variety of pc's.
Add to that the legacy of the battlefield series on the pc and the lukewarm reception of Ghosts and it's easy to see why so few people want to play it.

Trailer for the new game seems like a desperate attempt to make Titanfall obsolete. COD 4 set new standards, now it's lagging behind.
 
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