Activision, one of the leading game franchises in the gaming industry, has just announced that they will be closing the servers “Call Of Duty Online” in the coming month of August 2021.
The news which was published on their game’s official website on 31st May 2021 and was first noticed by Daniel Ahmad states that the game’s online servers are going to completely shut down on 31st of August 2021 and the player’s data would be erased off. According to Ahmad “declining revenue and lack of renewal from Activision” are the main reasons for the closure of the game.
Tencent will be shutting down Call of Duty Online in China at the end of August.
The F2P PC game for China launched in 2015 and was fairly successful.
Declining revenue and lack of renewal from Activision will see the game close. Users will be pushed towards CODM instead. pic.twitter.com/pBMQ05N32x
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) May 31, 2021
In January 2015 CoD Online made its debut back and was designed exclusively for the Chinese market. Prior to this the company made several attempts to sell its COD games in the Chinese market but failed to do so as it struggled with the costs and Chinese Distribution Laws. But then in 2011, the company made a partnership with Tencent Gaming, one of China’s biggest gaming firms, to make a game that would be exclusive to the gaming community of Chinese people. A beta version of the game was soon released in 2012, following the official release in January 2015, and saw a very good response upon its release. The game in China is operated, distributed, & marketed by Tencent gaming, which is also the operator of the famous mobile game PUBG.
The Game is a 1st person shooter PC free-to-game, which features some of the same multiplayer modes as the other games in the franchise do with several prominent changes. “Hero Ops” is a single-player mission mode, a cooperative survival mode similar to Counter-Strike, and a special “Cyborg” mode which is an alternative to the franchise’s famous zombie mode. It is made so, keeping in mind the Chinese censorship law.
Where other games in the franchise like CoD: Black Op Cold War, CoD Warzone, CoD Mobile, have earned the company a record revenue in the Q1 of 2021, CoD Online has failed to deliver any such results for the franchise.
However, the company is offering an alternative to the game in the form of CoD Mobile, which made its debut last year December in China and was an immediate hit with over 10s of millions downloads. The publishers are now pushing and encouraging the players to join the mobile community, and they are doing it by offering compensation to the players of Online platform when they register themselves to the mobile platform with freebies, skins and special characters and in-game cash with which they can purchase in-game items as well.
While some seemed to support this move, many other players in the online gaming community are annoyed with this decision of the gaming giant, stating that “why do they even think a pc player would ever want to go to his tiny mobile to play a game?”.
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Whether it is the right move or not, or will the online players choose from other alternative PC free-to-play multiplayer games, the results will only be seen only after the servers are closed in August 2021.
We will keep you updated with any further news, until then stay tuned.
