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[STEAM] Amid Game Closures and a Declining Audience, Call of Duty Is in a Rough Spot — So What’s Next?

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, the game that was meant to lead the battle royale into a new era.

Over the weekend, Activision pulled Warzone Mobile from iOS and Android app stores, with the scope of the game being “streamlined" and an admission it had not met expectations. While servers will remain online for now, no new content or updates will be issued to the game, and players can no longer spend real money in it.

"We're proud of the accomplishment in bringing Call of Duty: Warzone to mobile in an authentic way, [but] it unfortunately has not met our expectations with mobile-first players like it has with PC and console audiences,” Activision said.

It’s a brutal end for a game that clearly struggled right out of the gate. Warzone Mobile launched in March 2024 on iOS and Android as a Warzone-specific Call of Duty mobile experience that offered battle royale for up to 120 players, as well as cross-progression with the PC and console Warzone, Modern Warfare 2 and 3, and, later in the year,
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.

IGN's
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returned an 8/10. We said: "Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile includes all the best elements of Warzone, while speeding up and streamlining matches and using cross-progression to make this a meaningful extension of the traditional experience."

Activision’s hope was that Warzone Mobile would make a splash in the competitive mobile shooter market, where the hugely successful Call of Duty Mobile, developed by Tencent-owned TiMi Studio Group, is already established. With Call of Duty Mobile, which has seen 1 billion downloads since launch, revenue is shared between Activision and Tencent. Warzone Mobile, on the other hand, was developed entirely in-house at Activision, and so the company received a ******* slice of the money pie every time a player dropped cash on a battle pass or a cosmetic.

But Warzone Mobile, which requires more powerful mobile phones than Call of Duty Mobile to work well, failed to meet Activision’s expectations, and its development team was scaled down when, in September last year,
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.

Now, Call of Duty fans, especially those who did play Warzone Mobile, have lamented the state of the game and indeed the franchise.

“This game simply came out too early and wanted to be too greedy,”
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. “It could be seen on the
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videos, a lot of gameplay was not fluid with weird graphics, it could be seen that even if the game is playable, the device struggles to run it. The world of mobile gaming is cursed, it's not just Warzone that's dying. Dead by Daylight mobile and Star Wars hunter will also close the doors.”

“Turns out mobile games need to be optimized on most devices to be successful, you can't just cater to high end devices and hope your game succeed — it won't,”
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.

“Greed is a dangerous thing. Activision was too greedy and when it leaked that they planned on killing CODM in favor of WZM they essentially turned tens of millions of people against the game. It became ‘us vs them’ and CODM is vastly more accessible than WZM — the loss was guaranteed.”

What's next for Call of Duty, which appears to be in a tricky spot right now? Earlier this month,
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reported that while ****** Ops 6 launched big late last year, the Call of Duty franchise saw its users decline afterwards, and “more sharply” than in recent years.

Here’s the relevant blurb:

... the reality is that despite a strong start, Call of Duty has struggled to engage players to the degree it has in the past. According to Ampere, in March 2025, Call of Duty had 20.6 million players. That is still a huge number, but it’s slightly less than March 2024, which had 20.8 million players, and well down on March 2023, which saw 22.4 million players.
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, but with the honeymoon ******* over and
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, all eyes are on Activision and this year’s Call of Duty game to see if the still-huge first-person shooter franchise can reinvent itself once again.

Related, there are a number of apparent datamined gameplay videos doing the rounds that show wall-running and even jet packs working in ****** Ops 6. This, some believe, indicates this year's ****** Ops 7 will ditch Activision’s ‘boots on the ground’ mantra for gameplay reminiscent of ****** Ops 3.

They also added jetpacks lol
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— Bikou (@Kivikou)
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Activision told IGN its teams are busy and moving forward on a variety of work, so hopefully we’ll see the fruits of that soon.
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. Perhaps Call of Duty will turn up there. And, meanwhile, Call of Duty: Mobile is going strong, but, as we’ve pointed out, it’s not as lucrative a business for Activision, despite being *******.

Activision Blizzard’s recent mobile struggles also call into question
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’s $69 billion acquisition of the company itself, given Xbox boss Phil Spencer has made no secret that the decision was in part motivated by Xbox’s lofty mobile ambitions (Activision Blizzard owns King, the maker of phenomenally popular mobile game Candy Crush). Indeed,
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plans to launch an app store of its own, taking on Apple and
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in the lucrative mobile game space.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on
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at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld.

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