As Season 5 launches today in both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Warzone, Activision has revealed that the latter has reached a new milestone. “Thank you to over 75 million players,” posted the studio on social media, earlier today. 75 million is higher than the game has ever reached before, and indeed, dwarfs the engagement of most other games.
Call of Duty: Warzone Reaches 75 Million Players
Ever since launch earlier this year, Call of Duty: Warzone has been enormously successful. The game’s player count grew extraordinarily fast upon release. In its first week, the game attracted 15 million players, and that number doubled to 30 million after two weeks. After two months, the player count reached 60 million and seemed to plateau at last. However, what both Modern Warfare and Warzone have been enormously successful with isn’t merely attracting millions of players, it’s player retention.
Apex Legends, by comparison, gained a massive player count in its first month. However, a huge proportion of this audience quickly abandoned the game, causing its engagement to drop sharply in the months that followed. Warzone, however, has been extremely successful at keeping its players playing. This new announcement reinforces that; three months since the game hit 60 million players, the figure hasn’t dropped. In fact, it’s risen by another 25% to 75 million!
Of course, there is likely to be a surge accompanying the launch of Season 5 today, but the fact that Warzone’s numbers don’t appear to have dropped much at all since launch is very impressive. Indeed, Warzone has quickly cemented its place as one of the foremost free-to-play FPS titles. Other games like Fortnite and Apex Legends are almost certain to have lost players to Warzone. (In much the same way that CS:GO has lost players to Valorant.)
Apex Legends boasted of hitting 70 million players back in August of 2019. Meanwhile, Fortnite hit 78 million all the way back in August of 2018, two full years ago. Neither studio has publicly released player counts since, suggesting that both have only fallen in the intervening months. No doubt Warzone’s success has only exacerbated that trend.