> Vanguard, And By Extension Skill Based Matchmaking, Ain’t Doing So Hot

From the Activision Blizzard Q1 Earnings report:

  • Call of Duty® net bookings on console and PC declined year-over-year in the first quarter, reflecting lower premium sales for Call of Duty: Vanguard versus the year ago title and lower engagement in Call of Duty: Warzone™. Call of Duty Mobile net bookings were little changed year-over-year.

  • The Call of Duty teams delivered substantial gameplay improvements for Vanguard and Warzone in the first quarter. Development on this year’s premium and Warzone experiences, led by Infinity Ward, is proceeding very well. This year’s Call of Duty is a sequel to 2019’s Modern Warfare®, the most successful Call of Duty title to date, and will be the most advanced experience in franchise history. The new free-to-play Warzone experience, which is built from the ground-up alongside the premium game, features groundbreaking innovations to be revealed later this year.

  • Activision continued to rapidly expand its Call of Duty development resources in the first quarter. Its growing teams are focused on delivering even more compelling content to the community on PC and console, as well as expanding Warzone to the mobile platform.

No surprise that sales are down regarding Vanguard. While it’s not a bad game in and of itself it’s sort of the game nobody wanted. Nobody wanted a World War 2 game at this point though I do get where the creatives are trying to go in terms of world building. It makes sense in that regard. Part of the problem with sales, in my opinion, is that this “shadow” skill based matchmaking that-we-all-know-exists-but-the-developers-can’t-even-acknowledge is creating a poor experience for players. Perhaps the WW2 thing would have been better received if matchmaking was normal and made things fun instead of needlessly competitive. I shouldn’t be punished for playing the game well. I think the other thing to blame here is that Cold War’s matchmaking was even more strict than I remember Modern Warfare’s to be. I know for a fact that sent most of my group back to Halo. It also doesn’t help that the general multiplayer experience is just meh. We’ll talk more about that later but it just feels like Sledgehammer just couldn’t make design decisions and dumped them on the player in the name of “customization”. We also won’t discuss the incredible amount of bugs this game shipped with. Games ship with bugs but I feel like both Cold War and Modern Warfare were in much better places by this time in their cycles.I won’t call bullshit on those substantial improvements for Vanguard1 but they aren’t even close to fixing a lot of the issues with this game. Let’s not talk about map rotation and how people are playing the same maps over and over again. I havent seen Berlin, Gavutu, or most of the launch maps since…. well, launch actually. Still haven’t played Gondola. At this point Vanguard just feels abandoned with the seasons filling the void for when Modern Warfare II launches in October. And then there’s the cheating problem. No wonder Monthly Active Users were down 7 million for the quarter and 50 million year over year. > ▋