Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has never failed to set the world on fire since its release last month. The release received fairly lukewarm reviews and was not well-received by the fanbase. It's been widely reported that Black Ops 7 is struggling commercially compared to the rest of the series (and its main competitors), and that Activision is doing its best to lure people in with free skins.
Things were looking pretty bleak, so the start of Season 1 brought things back to normal. Live service games like Black Ops 7 almost always see a significant increase in player count at the start of each season. Right? This is the game's opportunity to bring people back, get the game back on track, and try to keep the new guys around for as long as possible. Right?
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Season 1 Fails to Increase Player Count
Obviously not. If you look at Black Ops 7's player count on SteamDB before and after the release of Season 1, you'll see that it only attracted a few thousand players at most. On December 3, a day before the season's launch, Black Ops 7 hit a peak player count of 57,331.
Today, one day after the season began, Black Ops 7 reached peak player count of 62,229, an increase of roughly 5,000 players. Sure, there are a lot of them, but when compared to other games or other Call of Duty titles, it's a very small increase compared to what's been billed as one of the biggest seasonal launches in the series' history.
Black Ops 7 was the worst user-rated Call of Duty, falling below Modern Warfare 3.
Black Ops 7 is tied with DS spinoff Modern Warfare 3: Defiance as the worst-reviewed Call of Duty in series history.
Let's take Marvel Rivals as an example. Before Season 5 launched on November 14, Marvel Rivals' peak player count was 93,170, but after Season 5 began, that number increased dramatically, reaching a whopping 160,144 the day after it launched. This is a more typical player increase for a live service game, but we haven't experienced anything near these levels in Black Ops 7.
Of course, Steam numbers aren't everything, and Black Ops 7 is on Game Pass so it's free to play on Xbox, but player counts on different platforms are generally correlated. A drop on Steam will likely mean there will be a drop on PlayStation and Xbox as well, and unfortunately, it's painting a very bleak picture for Activision. People don't care about Black Ops 7.
