Take a look at the reviews, and find this insanity on the top:

need to be connected to online services even when you just want to play singleplayer campaign, and keep getting connection errors.

Thanks, I’m out.

If you still play CoD nowadays then you are actively supporting the problem.

You are missing the most important issue. It only runs on Windows!

Thats the neat part, just dont.

Bro the CoD ship sailed years ago. They just don’t innovate and release the same shit year after year. Buy something else. I’d recommend Factorio.

You don’t. You play single player games like me and get to experience cool stories instead of dopamine lacking rage inducing PvP games.

This kind of thing is why I dont get excited for steam sales now. Oh, 50% off Recent AAA Game? Haha, yeah, half off the base price, but the entire game is DLC now and each of those is still full price, and there’s a dozen of them.

Maybe because there are still people who are not tired of Call of Duty, liked the predecessor and are still looking forward for a sequel and play it with their friends?

Oh wait, this isn’t even the newest CoD? Probably they just forgot to update the prices. Probably forgot it even exists because there is a new one.

It’s for people with more money than brains.

Reviews are mixed: not a great start

More than not a great start: Only people who have bought the game are allowed to review it, so reviewers are already biased towards liking the game, because only somebody who thinks they would enjoy the game would spend money on it. It’s basically impossible to get a strong negative score by just being run of the mill awful. So “mixed” means that about 50% of people who though they would enjoy the game, didn’t, which is quite damning.

I feel like they could have called CoD Points something other than CP. 🤣

When people may get into a competitive game, data shows that they commit to it as their primary game.

It becomes a part of their identity. You see things like Leage of Legends going strong despite a slow down in new players - people just commit to it for better or for worse, likely because most of the skills they’ve gained in it and friends they’ve made will not transfer to other games. Even other FPS games have different nuances that are non trivial once a player becomes serious about winning.

Take Wild Rift vs Mobile Legends Bang Bang. MLBB is objectively a worse rip off of League of Legends and the Chinese game Glory of Kings, but it was first to market on mobile. Now that League has released their mobile version with immense polish and quality, many mobile moba gamers just aren’t interested - they’re already totally invested in their main game, despite it being proved in court that it’s a cheap copy. (Not cheap as in $$$ though)

When you’re a kid, spending time on any competitive game will be fun (if you can handle the baseline toxicity) since you will start bad at most of them. When you get older there is a real cost to switching, you will not have as much fun until you build up the years of muscle memory that would be needed to even approach your skill at the previous game.

Because of the lock in, if a competitive game finds a sizeable enough player base and lasts a good handful of years, the devs essentially get free rein to milk their cow as they see fit.

Short answer: you wouldn’t buy this game, given your valid criticisms.

This type of extortionate pricing policy speaks to the general user base being nobs, die hard try hards and probably a toxic gaming environment. Having a barrier to entry in any activity prevents total idiots from entering. Consoles have made it easier for people who don’t understand how to operate a PC to play games but that necessarily means those games will be replete with obnoxious people. The advent of smartphones has done that for the internet.

That’s why pirating AAA games is morally justified.

I can’t say I like how /Games often circles around negative attention rather than positive.

Activision spent billions on marketing so people will buy these stupid Ultra Editions. Even negative attention gets people thinking about and talking about the game.

Instead, post about the cool indie games out that you think deserve far more attention than this battle pass slop. Let Activision come check up on us and cry because for all their efforts no one even cares to hate on their game.

Theres an asymmetric game out as a demo, called Carnival Hunt. It has a really unique aesthetic, and isn’t all that fun yet, in part because of the formula being refined and players getting better at it. But I like the idea: Rather than TCM’s idea of unlocking doors towards an exit, the survivors, “bunnies”, are trying to climb the floors of a large building, with each method of ascending a floor requiring various tools and making noise. Some ways up are harder to set up but easier to repeat, others only work if the killer is ignoring them.