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A new poll has given some insight into why Call of Duty: Vanguard appears to be selling less than previous years. Call of Duty: Vanguard is the eighteenth game in the mainline series, so at some point, the series was expected to slow down. It's highly unlikely a franchise that releases every year can sustain the momentum of its high sales and it seems like 2021 is the year that the Call of Duty train has begun to pump the brakes.
Call of Duty: Vanguard's reviews were generally decent, as the game holds a 74 on Metacritic, but very few reviews are particularly glowing. Sledgehammer Games seemingly hasn't delivered a bad game, but it's also not something that anyone is latching on to because it doesn't have anything new or innovative for the long-running franchise. Even though many fans were excited to return to the WW2 battlefield, a setting that many missed, it seems that Vanguard can't piggyback off of that.
Gaming outlet Call of Duty: Vanguard's soft sales in the UK and was an effort to pinpoint why the game isn't putting up its usual numbers. The three biggest factors were other game releases (55%), Call of Duty fatigue (34%), and a lack of interest in WW2 games (24%).
None of these are shocking, as Vanguard was released in the same month as Battlefield 2042 and the surprise launch of Halo Infinite's multiplayer. It was always going to be a competitive period, but it certainly doesn't help that fans are burnt out on Call of Duty, and the game is set in a period that fans aren't very interested in anymore. As of right now, Vanguard's sales in the US are unknown, but the UK's initial sales figures don't paint a rosy picture.
Given the historic power and popularity of Call of Duty, it seems unlikely that the game won't be at the top of the November sales charts. Battlefield 2042 was plagued by a buggy launch and Halo Infinite's multiplayer is free, so the stiff competition may not have been enough to knock it off the number one spot. Nonetheless, a soft launch for Call of Duty: Vanguard may be enough to rattle Activision and possibly spark some changes in the series going forward.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz