Is Black Ops 6 a Flop Game?

How does someone measure if something has flopped or not? What is the criteria for the success of anything? Is it a monetary success? Is it about reaching the souls of the target audience with your exceptional product? Is it about being remembered even after years?

The real answer to the question of “How does someone decide if something has flopped or not?” has remained unanswered because there is not a single determining or conclusive metric that can give you a solidified answer to this.

For some people, a flop movie is a masterpiece, while for some gamers, a flopped game has the greatest game mechanics and top-notch storytelling. Meanwhile, some of the best and most prominent games fail to deliver a simple, enjoyable experience. So, whenever you decide to consider declaring something a flop or a hit, you need to consider the metric of success you’re going to measure.

Since gaming is a creative space, declaring a creative art form as a flop or a hit is heavily dependent on who you ask. So, in this blog, there’s another game we are going to discuss, and we are going to weigh in on different perspectives about that game.

If it is a hit or a flop, we will consider the monetary success of it, as well as the storytelling it tries to convey and the cultural impact it has. Today’s game is Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and in this blog, we are going to dissect how successful this game is or how big of a flop the game has been.

How Is Black Ops 6 a Success?

First of all, let’s talk about the game from a faraway point and think about it as an entertainment product, which it is. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the biggest sale in this franchise’s history. In the two decades of Activision’s flagship series, the number of sales has never been higher than Black Ops 6, which makes it a great success for the game and its community.

There could also be a factor of Game Pass, which allows players to try the game for only $10 a month. If you haven’t got a Game Pass, I highly recommend you do because it provides astronomical value for the money.

Back to the topic, another major thing to consider is the return of OG fans to the game. Honestly, the past few titles of the game were simply awful in terms of a full-fledged experience that made the foundation of the Call of Duty franchise. Titles like Black Ops Cold War or the remasters after remasters of Modern Warfare made fans more rebellious against the franchise.

The return of Black Ops 6 calmed them down and made them return to their beloved game.

Apart from reclaiming their player base and getting the highest sales in the franchise’s history, the game is also way less bloated with pay-to-win skins. I don’t know if you count it as a success to have a game with fewer microtransactions than before, but if you do, then Black Ops 6 easily takes the dub in that criteria. Unlike Cold War, Modern Warfare 3 Remastered, and of course, Warzone, which had the most amount of pay-to-win cosmetics compared to any other title in the franchise, Black Ops 6 removed that unfair advantage from the players and has made the game a little more of a fair playground.

The Strong Points of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Being a Success:

• Highest lifetime sales in the franchise.
• Highest player count in the history of the game.
• Has improved upon the previous title.
• Has reclaimed its core player base.

Now, based on this, we can conclusively consider Black Ops 6 a hit game. As for the standard Call of Duty game, it is not a flop like Call of Duty: WWII or Advanced Warfare. It has sold more copies than those two titles combined. But that does not mean that the game did not have any shortcomings. So before anything, let’s talk about them as well.

Shortcomings of the Game

First of all, the game did not feel like something new, as it always does. This year, Activision played it a little safer and banked on their beloved Black Ops franchise, which millions of players around the world, including me, love. They just repacked the game with better graphics but the same mechanics as last year and called it a day.

The second shortcoming of the game is its ancient anti-cheat system, and if you have played the game before, you know what I am talking about. In the lower ranks, this doesn’t affect the experience as much, but when you get above Platinum, you will face a cheater every 2 to 3 matches, making the game unplayable. Many players who want to progress smoothly without dealing with hackers often opt for rank boosting for BO6 to skip the frustration and enjoy fair competition at higher ranks.

Apart from that, the game still glitches regularly, which is kind of expected due to it being an always-online game, making it harder and harder to combat bugs and glitches.

While these issues do not affect how the game has performed in terms of sales, for me, they are deal-breakers. If these problems were present in any other game, it would not even get 100,000 concurrent players. But due to Call of Duty being such a big name in gaming, we have just accepted this as our fate.