Microsoft has become elusive when it comes to their business numbers. While there are certain legally required disclosures that they make to their investors and the public, the company has opted to hide some specific figures.
For example, we no longer know how much money Microsoft’s Surface hardware line, or their Xbox division, makes in every quarter.
You could get this information if you pay for the data from analytics and financial services firms like Circana, but even then you may not be at liberty to then make that information public.
So, we had to take Microsoft’s word for it when they make claims like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 being the biggest release in the franchise’s history, or that it saw higher numbers on Game Pass and PC.
In general, we don’t expect that Microsoft would make factually incorrect claims. But lacking the actual numbers, we can’t fully scrutinize and analyze the impact of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. For that matter, we don’t know how much money Call of Duty has made for Microsoft.
In part, Microsoft may also not really be able to crunch those numbers that quickly for themselves. We don’t know the specific metrics they use to decide that a game has made its money back after being played on Game Pass.
That may be because Microsoft’s formulas may be imperfect themselves, so they make estimates at best. Alternately, they may use metrics and formulas to decide on a game’s success that are genuinely complicated and too esoteric to explain to people outside the business.
But now we know one more thing that indicates the extent of Call of Duty’s success. Klobrille shared this tweet earlier today:
“Call of Duty is now #1 Most Played [US] on Xbox, overtaking Fortnite in what felt like a years-long domination. Both entries are hubs for multiple games.”
True enough, as of this writing, we can confirm that Call of Duty has overtaken Fortnite in the “Most Played” ranking on Xbox’s store, followed by Roblox, NBA 2K25, and Rainbow Six Siege. For the sake of posterity, we have taken a snapshot of this happening, and you can see it below.
As you may have also noticed, three out of those five titles aren’t standalone titles. Instead, they are ‘platforms’ or hubs, from where you can access multiple games and other content.
It’s easy to dismiss this as fodder for console gamer discourse, since Microsoft publishes Call of Duty. But what’s important here is that Activision’s franchise has become a genuine contender to Fortnite’s years long domination of the market.
Call of Duty may have live service elements as well, but it’s still a franchise comprised of separate titles sold as fully priced games, as opposed to a platform, hub, or ‘metaverse’, as Epic calls it, which lives on microtransactions.
This is the first sign in some time that microtransaction free-to-play model can be challenged by fully priced games once again. We don’t know if this is an outlier for now, but if this is something Activision can do year after year, it would still be a disruption to what has become the uncomfortable status quo the industry has been in for some time.
