Black Ops 6 is quickest promoting COD ever as Xbox console gross sales drop 29%

Considering it came out almost a week ago, it seemed odd that Microsoft had not said anything about how Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 has sold yet. As it turns out, they were they were waiting for their latest financial results this week.

Microsoft as a company obviously has nothing to worry about but the Xbox division continues to be in a very peculiar position. Revenue from console sales have fallen by 29% in the last three months and that’s estimated to mean just 1.3 million Xbox Series X/S shipments in the last three months, which is pitifully low.

At the same time though, Xbox revenues grew by 43%. That seems very healthy until you realise that that’s solely due to sales of Activision Blizzard games and if Microsoft hadn’t bought them, for $75.4 billion, then growth would’ve been exactly 0%.

Xbox had no prominent first party games out in the period, so the next quarter should see at least some non-Activision Blizzard related growth, but these results show that in terms of growth and profit Xbox basically is Activision Blizzard now – with the rest of their games business currently being little more than a footnote.

The massive cost of buying Activision Blizzard would’ve been a huge problem for any other company but while Microsoft can easily absorb it, it’s been clear for a while now that Xbox execs are under great pressure to increase growth.

This combined with the rapidly declining sales of the Xbox Series X/S explains Microsoft’s move towards multiformat publishing, although the exact details of their plans remain shrouded in mystery – likely because Microsoft itself isn’t sure how far to push things.

It wasn’t released in time to be part of the financial results, or that 43% figure would be even higher, but Microsoft has revealed that Black Ops 6 had the biggest launch in Call Of Duty history and was 60% up on last year’s game.

Since last year’s game was the much reviled Modern Warfare 3 that’s not saying much, but according to Microsoft, Black Ops 6 also set the record for the most ‘Game Pass subscriber adds on launch day.’

They’ve not offered any numbers or sales figures to quantify any of that but since Black Ops 6 is one of the best entries in several years it’s no surprise to see it doing well. Modern Warfare 3 might have been a disappointment, but it was still one of the biggest selling games of 2023, so Black Ops 6, by virtue of actually being good, should sell even better.

Most of those sales though are going to be on PlayStation 4 and 5, and while Microsoft won’t give sales data for the Xbox Series X/S either it’s currently estimated to have sold just 30 million units worldwide – less than half that of the PlayStation 5 and less than the N64, Mega Drive, SNES, and Xbox One.

If Microsoft hadn’t already announced they are making a next gen console you would assume this is the point where they’d just give up the gaming hardware business, but the fact that they have not makes it even harder to predict their future plans.