Activision's camo-clad cash cow Call of Duty has ruled the shooter roost for almost 20 years in the US, consistently topping the charts for games involving guns since 2006. But according to games industry analyst Mat Piscatella, that might just change in 2025.
Sharing some insights on Bluesky, (via GameSpot) Piscatella pointed out "the last shooter game to outsell Call of Duty in the US market over a full year was Gears of War, in 2006" according to data from the retail tracking service of his company Circana. He also noted that "The last FPS to do so was Star Wars: Battlefront 2" a year prior" and that Call of Duty "has been the US market's best-seller in 13 of the past 16 years" beaten only by Grand Theft Auto V, Hogwarts Legacy, and Red Dead Redemption 2.
There are, however, numerous complicating factors here. Circana's data reflects only retail sales, and does not factor in digital sales or players who might be playing Call of Duty on Game Pass. We already know that Call of Duty's presence on Game Pass impacts its raw sales figures, with Microsoft revealing in October that releasing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on the service led to $300 million in lost sales.
What we don't know, for sure, is how many people signed up to Game Pass to play Call of Duty. The most recent figure available for Game Pass subscribers is 35 million as of July 2025, but that was sourced from a LinkedIn post of a Microsoft project manager. The previous confirmed figure was from February 2024, where Microsoft reported that Game Pass had 34 million subscribers. If Game Pass has only grown by 1 million subs since Call of Duty was added to the service, that doesn't seem great, and unlikely to compensate for $300 million in lost sales. But we just don't know how accurate those figures are.
That said, there are other clues that Call of Duty has reaped a poor harvest this year. Normally, Activision shares some stats from Call of Duty's launch weekend on social media, such as last year's post the publisher bragged about having "the biggest Call of Duty three-day opening weekend ever". But hard numbers were conspicuously absent from this year's post. Instead, Activision simply thanked its fans, stated that it had seen "a great response to the quality and depth of gameplay in Black Ops 7", and stressed that "this is only the start".
Either way, seeing Black Ops 7 get trounced by critics and players alike cannot be reassuring for Microsoft, which, given the average time it takes to develop a game (4-5 years) hasn't had a chance to make its mark on the series yet since it acquired Activision. The company has held ludicrous expectations of a 30% profit margin from the Xbox division since 2023, which goes a long way to explain the company's mass layoffs, studio closures and game cancellations, as well as its desperation to get Xbox games on as many platforms as possible. Microsoft surely expected Call of Duty to contribute a big chunk of that, and if it isn't, I shudder to think about how the company might react.
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