Black Ops 7's launch day Steam player count is significantly lower than last year's Call of Duty, suggesting Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6 ate a hefty portion of its lunch

It's Call of Duty launch day—the yearly festival in which millions of eager revelers are presented with a fresh crop of maps, weapons, and killstreaks to enjoy as they slide, wallhop, and twitch their way through combat in a pseudonarcotic mania. This year's paramilitary bacchanal, however, seems a more muted celebration: On Steam, Black Ops 7 is drawing Call of Duty's lowest launch day player count since the series made its return to the Valve storefront in 2022. According to SteamDB, which uses public data from the Steam API, there are 81,000 users playing Call of Duty on Steam at time of writing—well below the player counts of Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6, which are currently drawing around 370,000 and 236,000 simultaneous players, respectively. This does place Call of Duty in the top 10 of most-played games on Steam. But in comparison, when a similar amount of time had passed since Black Ops 6's midnight launch in 2024, Call of Duty was being played by almost 230,000 players on Steam. In other words, Black Ops 7 is generating roughly one third of the launch day interest on Steam that Call of Duty had mustered last year. Steam concurrent player counts, admittedly, only provide an incomplete picture of Call of Duty player activity. Users playing Black Ops 7 via an Game Pass subscription, for example, wouldn't be represented in those numbers. But even if we're limiting our scope to Steam activity, it's a stark decline. This isn't exactly a surprise. For months, it's been clear that Call of Duty was facing its unfriendliest market in recent memory: As players voiced growing fatigue with COD's yearly churn and gradual Fortnitification, Battlefield 6 made a compelling pitch as a military shooter alternative. And barely two weeks before the Black Ops 7 launch, Arc Raiders emerged as an unexpected multiplayer phenomenon. Where it usually enters the holiday season with competing games going out of their way to create distance from it on the calendar, COD is facing a crowded field at the exact moment its footing seems shakiest. Call of Duty launches (and indeed Steam launches in general) typically see their peak player counts on the weekend, so we can probably expect to see Black Ops 7 gain some momentum. But while we're probably not witnessing the realtime collapse of one of gaming's biggest franchises, the glimpses I've seen of BO7's boss fights against giant guys in the pasghetti dimension don't exactly inspire confidence.