As announced today, Call of Duty: Warzone, the franchise's first free-to-play, and second overall take on the battle royale genre, has managed the massive feat of garnering over 30 million players. More impressively though, this achievement comes only ten days after Call of Duty Warzone's initial launch date, on March 10th of 2020.
The announcement was made over a post on Call of Duty's official Twitter page. Fairly simple in nature, the post stated that the game had reached 30 million Warzone players before thanking the game's community with a short message and a promotional image, then urging other prospective players to join in, making particular mention of the game's free-to-play structure.
The gameplay of Warzone is relatively straightforward, mainly being a hybrid between staple battle royale mechanics and Call of Duty's signature gameplay and features. While maintaining the battle royale standard of dropping players into a map scattered with weapons and vehicles with only one life and a single winner, Warzone features an unusually large amount of players, totaling up to 150.
However, Warzone also utilizes gameplay elements from the mainline Call of Duty games, including loadouts, killstreaks, and perks. These elements are then often tweaked in some way to make them fit better within the framework of a battle royale game.
Over 30 million players places Call of Duty: Warzone with the two best-selling entries to the series, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, each of which sold a little under 31 million units. The main difference with Warzone which greatly aids it, however, is that it's a free-to-play title, unlike Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3, which were both paid entries.
While competitors like Fortnite have reached total player numbers well into the hundreds of millions, Call of Duty: Warzone's success is illustrated by the brief amount of time it's been available for. This surge in popularity is perhaps most comparable tp Apex Legends, which reached over 25 million players in its first week.
Warzone can only be expected to grow from here as it continues to gain time on the market, and as new features are introduced. Given this strong initial showing, more impressive numbers and achievements are almost certain to follow.
Call of Duty: Warzone is currently available for PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One.