Infinite Warfare Hits a Minefield in Steam Players

Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
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Infinite Warfare Hits a Minefield in Steam Players

Well, we all knew that Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare wasn't exactly going over well with the players. There's a bigger problem that's recently cropped up, though, and it's one that might mean an early end for the latest chapter of Call of Duty. New reports from data intelligence kingpins Githyp suggests that the space shooter isn't going over well at all, and has currently fewer players on Steam than even Payday 2.

The biggest number of online players that Infinite Warfare could generate, the Githyp report noted, was 15,280, through Sunday of its launch weekend. Given that Black Ops III generated over 60,000 simultaneous players, or nudging up on a ratio of four to one, it's clear that Infinite Warfare was not super well-received. Though 15,280 simultaneous players isn't bad objectively, it's not the greatest news subjectively, and that player count wasn't even sufficient to get it into the top 25 most-played games that weekend on Steam.

What's worse is that there's a problem of motivation involved; an unknown percentage of players specifically picked up Infinite Warfare so they could play Modern Warfare Remastered, and given the player numbers on that, that only means about another 4,546 people to add to the rosters. Even watchers aren't doing so well here; Livestream viewer counts are on the decline, and that's for PC and console alike, so any hope that Infinite Warfare players are focused on consoles is a fading hope at best. Reports suggest Twitch numbers are down as well.

There are many potential explanations: a Call of Duty burnout similar to that seen recently in Assassin's Creed, a bad weekend in general, a host of recently-released shooter games and some still set to arrive...all of these and more are rational enough. I'm of the mind that people might be just getting tired of this franchise, which has been hitting its audience with a new and vaguely similar version every year. Some time away from the field to reconsider the concept, add some new innovations, and in general get better could be a great way to revive the spark.

In the end, the players will speak, and right now the consensus is that they don't much care for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.


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