Will Call of Duty Warzone be long lived or die prematurely in the next 6 months?

Call of Duty: Warzone, the latest (or also called standalone game mode) battle royale game from Activision has officially been released. Needless to talk about the hotness of Call of Duty , especially in the fiery multiplayer battlefield that has been so attractive to gamers for decades. But the launch of Call of Duty: Warzone at this time provides opportunities and challenges for a billion-dollar brand like Call of Duty? Will Warzone continue the success of COD or will it stop running hot?

Opportunities: Free to Play model helps Call of Duty: Warzone reach a large number of gamers

It is true that Free to Play titles such as League of Legends or Fortnite are easy to access and possess huge numbers of players. No need to spend money to buy, all you have to do is download the game and enjoy, of course, not mentioning loot box or microtransaction.

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The most typical is Apex Legends, another Free to Play battle royale game launched early last year. Launched quietly on the day of publication without any aggressive marketing campaign, Apex Legends attracted tens of millions of gamers to register the game in a very short time. According to the developer Respawn Entertainment, instead of promoting the game, why not just launch the game and let players try it out, which is extremely accurate when the quality of Apex Legends is impressive enough. The majority of gamers enjoy it.

Call of Duty: Warzone this year also seems to learn this way when quietly announcing and launching quickly and for gamers to download. Not to mention the reputation and enormous influence of Call of Duty so far, with its large loyal fan community, Call of Duty: Warzone can completely reach more people. play new and have the opportunity to rise to the top of the market Free to Play game market.

Challenges: Battle Royale is an over-saturated game market

Since 2017, with the success far surpassing Player Unknown's Battleground, the game industry has witnessed a series of battle royale titles. From little known titles to popular brands like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Like many other trends in the gaming industry, there are so many battle royale genres that make gamers somewhat bored. It is fair to say that the battle royale has been saturated for a long time and only became somewhat hot again when Apex Legends brought a new breath to this genre last year.

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Now that the big players like PUBG, Fortnite and Apex Legends have somewhat cooled down, this is an opportunity for Warzone to gain a foothold in the market but at the same time is a big difficulty when the gamers do not seem Still interested in battle royale. Before that we had Battlefield V, a cult brand like Call of Duty that launched a battle royale mode called Firestorm. Despite being evaluated quite well, Firestorm quickly no longer appealed to players only a short time later.

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Infinity Ward and efforts to balance the luck of Warzone

Perhaps the unique mark that Infinity Ward wants to create for Warzone lies in reducing the importance of the element of chance and giving gamers the chance to take revenge.

Obviously Call of Duty: Warzone may initially have a large number of players, but there is no guarantee that Warzone can entice and hold players for long without a proper long-term step. At the same time Warzone will still have to compete fiercely with Fortnite and Apex Legends when they have cooled down but still maintained a large number of players and really stable.

Challenging against fraud

The eternal problem with online games is cheat hacking, especially FPS shooters with competitive elements. Games that have to buy money but still cheat hack rampant, with Free to Play game is definitely more painful when hackers can freely create new accounts to comfortably test hacking and sabotaging the game. Remember a year ago, Apex Legends encountered a similar problem when hackers flooded the game, causing EA and Respawn Entertainment to apply very drastic and aggressive measures that are somewhat limited.

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While Riot announcing measures against negative right after the announcement Valorant, then this side is not yet known what Activision has prepared to combat fraud issues in Call of Duty: Warzone. But certainly with a Free to Play product like Warzone, the fight against fraud will be extremely tough.

Life cycle challenge: Is it still attractive when Call of Duty is still released every year?

The fact is, there's no year in the year-end holiday season without Call of Duty, that's been going on for more than 10 years. Although Call of Duty: Warzone has just launched early this year, there will still be a new version released at the end of the year. Unless you are a nostalgic, want to stick with a long term Call of Duty game, the rest, the majority of gamers will also switch to a newer version and more players. And of course the annual version of Call of Duty will own all the single-player, multiplayer and co-op, richer content.

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So will Warzone with only one battle royale game mode be able to retain Call of Duty loyal fans as they move to the new COD every year? And if Warzone succeeds and maintains its players, does anyone want to spend $ 60 to buy a new COD game while Warzone is still free?

Or Activision actually has a higher ambition than to use the Call of Duty community to make exciting games in the next 6 months to attract new fans and then let fans switch to the next Call of Duty game at the end. years just keep the new entrant group? Perhaps we will have to wait and see the true intent of this game company in the near future.