10 Honest Reasons Call Of Duty Is Dying

By Andrew Wilmot / February 15, 2016

You can accuse Call of Duty for a lot of things, but 'unsuccessful' isn't one of them. As of April 2015, the series has sold over 175 million copies, making over $10 billion across 12 games, and since the release of Modern Warfare, has been the king of the FPS arena, becoming as iconic as other established franchises like Mario, Halo or FIFA. Or... maybe it's less of a Mario, and more of a Sonic? There are some deep issues within COD that are starting to kill the love we once had. The series itself is used as an example of everything that's wrong not just with modern shooters, but with the games industry as a whole. Hardcore gamers laugh at it, casual gamers are moving on, and every desperate attempt to slow its gradual decline only seems to reinforce the issue. There is still a large and loyal community and no doubt that Call of Duty will continue topping sales lists for a few more years to come, but unless there's some serious time put into remedying the various problems that risk killing off the franchise, Call of Duty has a good chance to simply slip into irrelevance. Why exactly is COD's number up? Well, let's take a look...

10. Fans Are Getting Bored Of The Gameplay

Whilst there's been a few tweaks here and there, Call of Duty's core gameplay mechanics have remained unchanged since at least Modern Warfare. You have a Michael Bay-esque single player campaign which contains a shopping list of every action film cliché and a fast-paced, reaction-based multiplayer. We've been playing the same game over and over for too long. The first Modern Warfare was released in 2007, and if you put Black Ops 3 next to it, what's changed, really? Multiplayer still involves you running round various small arenas, then whoever pulls the trigger first and keeps their shots on target, wins. You could argue that this simplicity is part of Call of Duty's success, and you'd probably be right. But this same simplicity means there's not much depth to the game, so even when done well, gamers will eventually get fed up with it.