It isn’t a surprise that people would be excited for the new Call of Duty game, as the franchise has been a mainstay in the gaming industry for years. To celebrate the launch, Activision has put a lot of work into the marketing for the game, and it’s claimed by the UK network EE and BT that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has drawn the largest traffic ever for a game launch in the country. If this is true, this is a huge milestone for the franchise and for Activision, but it also doesn’t come as much of a surprise, considering how much Activision spent on marketing for this game.
What does come as a surprise is the peak for the number of players flocking to their PC and Consoles wasn’t on the day of launch for the game; instead, it was October 21, which is when everyone who pre-ordered it would be able to pre-load the game ahead of its release.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is also a huge game, as it’s the first game to be available on Xbox Game Pass as a day-one release. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Warzone are also available to those who have Game Pass Ultimate. According to ISPreview, EE / BT saw a 144% increase in Xbox Live traffic on the broadband network compared to the week before. This is quite a monumental amount of traffic, but it isn’t too surprising, as Call of Duty games are known for having huge download sizes. While there were reports that the game would be a whopping 300 GB, it isn’t that big, thankfully. However, the game does still come in at a sizable 102 GB for pre-load, which, for a lot of people, will take a lot of time to install. Because of this, it makes perfect sense that the traffic for the game would increase so heavily on the pre-load day, as no one wants to be waiting around on release day trying to install a game at a snail’s pace.
At the moment, there haven’t been any official figures released on how Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been performing since release, but it has only been a couple of days thus far. It will be interesting to see the metrics for the number of players who come from Game Pass, as it is a significantly cheaper way to access the game than paying for the title outright, something that isn’t an option for many gamers.
Products mentioned in this post
