The Microsoft vs. FTC court hearing has been a source of consistent new and shocking information – one of which is the shocking number of PlayStation (PS4, PS5) users who only play Call of Duty (COD) and nothing else. As reported by Verge, the COD franchise is so dear to a whopping 1 million players that they play no other game (even if they are free).
Confidential PlayStation Documents Leak 1 Million Gamers Play ONLY Call of Duty
Some redacted information was unintentionally leaked due to the use of a Sharpie and the Verge ended up decoding the statements:
In 2021, over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty. In 2021, Call of Duty players spent an average of [116?] hours per year playing Call of Duty. Call of Duty players spending more than 70 percent of their time on Call of Duty spent an average of 296 hours on the franchise.
1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty. COD and nothing else. No early access games, no demos, no free-to-play titles, and no games from their PS Plus subscription.
This shows that if COD games were to become Xbox exclusive, PlayStation is going to take a huge hit revenue-wise. There’s more that PlayStation accidentally revealed – COD represents a whopping $800 million in the US itself and the number goes up to about $1.5 billion in terms of worldwide revenue. This includes consumer “spending on hardware, accessories, games, and other PlayStation services.”
The document reads “In addition to the harm to consumers who would no longer have the option of playing Activision games on their console of choice, the potential implications for SIE and its competitiveness are (redacted).”
Another section shows, “more than (redacted) unique PlayStation users have played Call of Duty, representing over 67% of PlayStation’s United States user base.” For the actual scanned images, be sure to check out the linked articles.
So there you have it – COD is massively popular on PlayStation in a way that has an enormous hold on the company’s revenue which will most likely continue since there is a new Call of Duty game every year.
In May 2023, COD MW2 boasted of around 7.1M average monthly players (according to activeplayer.io) and the numbers are bound to reach 8M+ during the last quarter of the year, as evidenced by the stats from the end of 2022.
For more COD and PlayStation-related coverage, be sure to explore Gamer Tweak.
