You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. In a way, it smells like… victory? Victory because the Call of Duty juggernaut is on the decline, according to reports. Sales have dropped over the last few years, making it still a juggernaut, but one in decline. There isn’t actually anything wrong with the Call of Duty games, funny enough. They are fine, but Call of Duty has sort of defined the past few years in gaming and the yearly iterations of games without much being new.
Call of Duty is also a really narrow view of the modern shooter, aimed towards the super fast-paced, twitch style of gaming that is based more on reflexes than skill or tactics. Like I said, that’s okay, but we need more variety out there. Apparently the pre-orders for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare are at 50% clip behind last year’s Call of Duty: Ghosts and 80% behind Black Ops II.
Are we seeing the fall of Call of Duty? Probably not. In fact, it will still sell tens of millions of copies, but it’ll sell a few million copies less, which is a few more million less than the previous year and so on. Change comes slowly, apparently, but it does come.