10 Recent Video Games That Were Too Big To Fail (That Did Anyway)
4. Call Of Duty: Vanguard
Why It Was "Too Big"
The Call of Duty franchise is more-or-less commercially bulletproof - the series to date has sold more than 400 million units, delivering tried-and-tested FPS thrills where a baseline level of polished entertainment is guaranteed every single time.
Why would the most recent entry, Call of Duty: Vanguard, be any different, especially with it being the franchise's first entry on new-gen consoles?
Why It Failed Anyway
Vanguard received the series' most mixed reviews since 2013's Ghosts - ironically itself the first Call of Duty for PS4/Xbox One - with many complaining about the short, over-familiar campaign, frustrating multiplayer time-to-kill, and perhaps most of all the utterly lackluster Zombies mode.
While Call of Duty doesn't fail in the way that most video game franchises do, Vanguard still received considerably more sustained vitriol from the fanbase than even more initially divisive entries like 2016's Infinite Warfare.
This prompted many to speculate that the game's development had been severely hampered by the pandemic.
The Damage
Though Call of Duty's sales have been consistently strong even with fluctuations, Vanguard suffered a brutal 40% drop from predecessor Cold War's launch. Worse still, this gave it the lowest launch sales for the series since 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Analysts pointed to a crowded marketplace with both Battlefield 2042 and Halo: Infinite releasing around the same time, but simply, the interest among all but the most devout fans just wasn't there.
Why bother shelling out top dollar for a new Call of Duty when you can just... keep playing the free-to-play Warzone instead?
The wider impact of Vanguard's under-performance is that Activision recently confirmed there won't be a Call of Duty game released in 2023, marking the first time in 18 years that the series won't release an annual title. Insiders even directly cited Vanguard's poor sales as the reason.
At least with Microsoft recently acquiring Activision, sales will become less of a concern as each new title presumably releases day-and-date on Xbox Game Pass.