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It has been one week since COD:Advanced Warfare was released (officially) and this is one of my most favorite times of a COD season because we get to look at launch numbers to get a feel for how good of a start the new COD title is off to. For each release I try to keep my hopes up but continuing with the recent trends of the last few years – COD interest on the PC just keeps dwindling with each release – including this one it seems. Over the launch week there hasn’t been a single day that the peak player counts even surpassed COD:Ghosts. The only positive side here is that although peak player counts didn’t surpass Ghosts; it was a lot closer to doing so than Ghosts was compared to Black Ops 2. In some instances Ghosts peak players counts on launch were nearly only half of Black Ops 2 but Advanced Warfare peak players counts stay much closer in respect to Ghosts. I guess that is a positive…
Looking at the Steam “peak player count” (or concurrent users) stats for the launch week in comparison to past years below we can see the trend continue. I think most understand the Steam player stats but just to clarify; this isn’t the total number of players playing the game on a given day but it is merely just the “peak” number of players playing at a specific time of a day (usually around 3:00 ET). Not complete data by any means but it is a very good representation of the games direction – and a general idea of how well the game was received or sales went.
[minimal_table]
| MW2 | BO | MW3 | BO2 | GHOSTS | AW | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DAY 0 | – | – | – | – | – | 27,961 |
| DAY 1 | 64,367 | 76,748 | 58,234 | 11,093 | 35,583 | 31,870 |
| DAY 2 | 101,368 | 92,903 | 76,307 | 51,240 | 36,901 | 31,762 |
| DAY 3 | 105,248 | 97,445 | 78,161 | 53,095 | 35,353 | 25,663 |
| DAY 4 | 108,618 | 104,233 | 78,648 | 54,705 | 36,016 | 32,118 |
| DAY 5 | 99,846 | 107,367 | 79,162 | 56,340 | 35,723 | 32,761 |
| DAY 6 | 98,632 | 118,593 | 86,832 | 60,191 | 37,268 | 35,017 |
| DAY 7 | 97,947 | 105,907 | 78,945 | 64,015 | 31,452 | 29,063 |
[/minimal_table]
Day 0 numbers are not available for the previous titles since Advanced Warfare was the first title to offer Day 0 access as a pre-order bonus.
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I really love this series and would really love to see it hit it big again on the PC but it is just downright depressing to continue to see these numbers decline at launch year after year after year knowing how large launch numbers used to be. There is a direct correlation of the feature sets that used to be included in these games that resulted in much more interest to now when everything is stripped out of the games and the player counts are stripped out as well. It is also depressing to continue to see each release struggle with the same problems year after year after year when we know what the solutions are – and the developers know what the solutions are. All the old school COD fans are on the same page. We know what would bring SOME of the life back to this game. The potential is there but year after year Activision and the developers just pass it buy so they can save money on development time and support time. In the past the excuse for the lack of servers and tools was always time. There was never enough time to get those feature sets packaged into the game or rolled out post launch. Well this year was a bonus round and SHG was granted an additional 365 days but what did that accomplish? Nothing. Not a dam thing for the PC side. We are left with the same garbage connections on the same peer to peer hosting arrangement and a whole lot of fluff elsewhere in the game that’s only good for the quick adrenaline rush. All the pre-launch smoke and mirrors have cleared and here we sit with another COD game that really does have so much potential and truly is pretty fun but will die quickly within months never to be played again because there is nothing to allow the community to extend the life of it except the hand of the developer and it’s overpriced DLC that just divides the community even more.
