Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Sales Plummet 61% in the UK - The AI Slop Era Is Finally Hitting the Bottom Line
You know the launch of your annual 80-euro game is rough when your publisher has to release a vague, aggressively enthusiastic tweet instead of hard sales data.
To say Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 is having a rough first weekend is the understatement of the year. The game, which launched last Friday, has been met with a deluge of fan complaints over its awful campaign and the alleged use of generative AI in its art. Now, the financial signs are backing up the consumer outrage.
According to data shared from market research company GfK, physical sales for Black Ops 7 in the UK are down a staggering 61% compared to last year’s Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6. To twist the knife, it also saw a smaller UK retail launch than its primary rival, Battlefield 6. (Via Metro)
The Steam Chart Humiliation
While physical media is shrinking, a 61% drop is a catastrophic failure by CoD standards and cannot simply be hand-waved away by saying "everyone went digital". The digital numbers we can track tell an even more brutal story.
Per SteamDB, Black Ops 6 peaked at over 306,000 concurrent players at launch in 2024, but Black Ops 7 has barely managed to crack 100,000 concurrent players since its release. To put that into perspective, the concurrent player count is roughly one-third of what the predecessor managed. It certainly looks like competitors like Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders are eating the franchise's lunch this year.
Game Pass and the Vague Victory Lap
It is not all doom and gloom for the multi-billion euro behemoth, however. The game is reportedly faring much better on PlayStation, where it is currently the second best-selling title on the UK PlayStation Store, only trailing EA Sports FC 26. The situation is murkier on Xbox, where the game sits outside the top 10 best sellers, a factor mostly attributed to its availability on Game Pass, which removes the incentive for users to buy a separate copy.
Perhaps the most telling sign of trouble is the silence from Activision. Last year, the company was quick to boast about the biggest three-day opening weekend in series history. This year? We get vague corporate platitudes.
"Across opening weekend, we’ve seen a great response to the quality and depth of gameplay in Black Ops 7," reads a post from the official Call Of Duty account. Based on the horrifically negative user reviews on Metacritic, that statement seems to be based on metrics other than player satisfaction. Their claim that "This is only the start" and that "our teams have an incredible year of content and events lined up" reads less like a promise and more like a threat given the poor reception.
Activision may eventually hit their revenue targets, as the brand loyalty is terrifyingly strong, but these early numbers are a glaring warning shot. The days when CoD could coast on yearly AI slop and the annual cycle might finally be over.