In recent days, it has been announced that the Modern War or Operation Black series will no longer be launched. According to the latest data from the Game Industry, Mission Call: Black Action 7 market performance was significantly below expectations. The work is not an ideal one for both the media and players, with 66 scores for the mainframe version and 57 for the PC version on the Metacric. Many third-party monitoring data show that their players are far less attractive than their predecessors.
According to Alinea Analytic, Operation Black 7 sold only 401,000 copies of Steam after 26 days of sale, compared to 2.3 million copies of Operation Black 6 during the same period last year, an achievement that was clearly unsatisfactory at the IP level of Mission Call. Alinea noted that the bid for Field 6 in early October was sold 5.7 times faster than Operation Black 7. It is important to note that, as a result of a previous fall of the Call of Mission series in steam and the influence of PC Game Pass subscription services, its sales on steam have historically been weak. Independent data from Newzoo show that, without accounting for the sale of Operation Black 7, the series of active users of the series, COD HQ, remained at 21.5 million monthly users between January and October 2025, with a cumulative total of 93.6 million players. Video Game Insights, additional steam data, shows that Operation Black is much worse than the last three generations of Mission Calles. – At the same time, online players peaked 80 per cent lower than Modern War II in 2022.
In addition, Video Game Insights states that its monitoring of active users of the PC, PlayStation and Xbox platforms is consistent with steam trends, indicating that Black Action 7 initially peaked below Black Action 6 in 2024. In November 2025, according to Video Game Insights, the total number of active users of the Call to Mission series dropped to 18 million, compared to 36 million in December 2024. Action Black 7 did not publish specific sales data at present, and in a strategic adjustment announcement signed by the “COD team”, the company declared that “the future of Mission Call remains strong” and expressed the hope that “the promotion of meaningful, not incremental, innovation” would be promoted, while emphasizing that “the specific plan, while not being published, will be shared at the appropriate time”. In its data report, Video Game Insights states: “The three main platforms (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) are significantly less active daily users than their recent baseline levels and no platform can compensate for the loss of other platforms. The level of player participation has declined significantly in the global ecological context. Interestingly, the relative stability of the proportion of users of each platform over the past 12 months indicates that the loss of players is not due to the migration of the platform, but reflects a general decline in interest in new developments.”
(The Call to Mission series has been halved since 2024)
“In sum, the data point to the fundamental user engagement challenge of Black Action 7. Whether the series is weak, product preferences are shifting, competitions are competing, or the expected mismatches with players, early indicators have made it clear that this is not a normal run-off of the distribution cycle, but rather a significant departure from historical performance.” Alinea Analytics analyst, Reese Elliott, believes that Operation Black 7 was set up as the Game Pass launch, “Absorbed the traditional full-price game sales of Xbox and PC platforms”. He also referred to recent reports that Operation Black 6 had cost Microsoft about $300 million in potential mainframe and PC sales revenues on its first-day landing on Game Pass. Elliot stressed: “Although the Call of Mission is still a big income, its weak performance has put pressure on other operations in the Microsoft game sector, which is faced with an almost elusive profit objective, and the results of Operation Black 7 provide clear and clear instructions for change under Microsoft’s control.”
“Whether this is the accidental failure of Mission Call or the beginning of the decline of the industry depends on the follow-up of Xbox.” Elliot’s poor analysis of Operation Black 7 stems from “community fatigue, questionable creative and commercial decision-making of moving vision and Microsoft, and the combined effects of intense competition.” “The specific problems of Operation Black 7 have exacerbated their weakness, but there are more systemic problems: the real-time shooting game market is now highly entrenched,” Elliot notes, for example, with the recent success of Arc Raiders and Hellguard II, that “even with a sophisticated IP like Mission Call, it is increasingly difficult to sustain success in this area. The path to success is no longer a routine annual guarantee, but requires excellent product quality, real innovation, or the identification of neglected sub-categories or new sub-markets, an area where the customs practices of old players are not yet fully dominant.” He concluded: “The Call to Mission has been almost immune to competition for many years, but now the players are divided and dissatisfied, the whole range of ideas is depleted, the competitors are more organized and targeted and, in the process, have produced record sales. Xbox needs to adjust its strategy, and the year is no longer working, and it is time to move on to a two-year Call to Mission, with a pattern of a war zone and seasonal content in between.”
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