Black Ops 6 and Warzone having the Squid Game crossover as the only scheduled event in January shows me that Activision and the other supporting development studios don’t have faith in themselves to generate new, original ideas.
On December 23, Raven Software and Treyarch signed off and departed for their holiday breaks. Before heading out, the Warzone development team promised an update in early 2025 that will address several community-requested issues such as Perks not working correctly.
Meanwhile, Treyarch left Multiplayer fans with eight days of Double XP and there is an update to kick off the new year that finally buffs the Wonder Weapon swords and makes a few other community-requested changes.
Despite those upcoming improvements, Ex-Call of Duty pro Scump worries about the franchise’s future since the BO6 topped 300,000-plus concurrent players on Steam at launch and is now struggling to pull in 100,000.
None of this decline would be an issue if the development team had a sure fire plan in place to restore faith. That plan is… Squid Game?
BO6 and Warzone Season 1 Reloaded conclusion falls flat
The Squid Game crossover event features new limited-time-modes in Warzone, Multiplayer and Zombies along with the new operator skins. Despite a few concerns about the Event Pass that locks some of the new cosmtic items behind a paywall, everything else included in the crossover is exciting.
However, the real issue is that Squid Game is all we have. Based on the current Battle Pass timer, we don’t expect Season 2 to start until January 29, leaving three and a half weeks with no content currently scheduled other than this event.
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The development team should have used this window as an opportunity to introduce new content, but it put all of its eggs in the Squid Game basket instead, and relied on a massive IP to tide players over rather than creating something truly original.
Sledgehammer Games has gotten a lot of flak over the years, but they did a stellar job at providing post-launch content in Modern Warfare 3. It’s easy to forget just how much effort they put into keeping that game fresh now that we’ve moved on from MW3. Weekly challenges with Aftermarket Parts as rewards and original events were the norm.
Without those features in BO6, Treyarch has had a more difficult time retaining the player base, and that shows with the declining numbers across multiplayer and Warzone. The people who keep CoD alive and sustain games for the year they have spotlight are already moving on.
This event will probably be great for Squid Game fans, but those highs are fleeting. Considering that the core fans are the audience that will keep the game alive in the long term, this strategy feels like a real miss from Treyarch. CoD may have lost faith in its ability to create something wholly original to draw players in.
What’s more, many of the features in this mode just reskin normal experiences in Zombies, Multiplayer, and Warzone. Very little here is actually unique, and all of it will be gone once the Squid Game event passes. We’ll be back to square one.
Call of Duty is having a real identity crisis at the moment, and relying on a TV show’s hype to promote the game does nothing but make that identity even less clear.