Call Of Duty 2025 is out now and yet Activision hasn’t sent out review copies, but are they hiding a dirty secret or is it just business as usual?

It’s quite rare for video game publishers not to send out review copies of their games before release. It certainly does happen, most famously with Starfield but also as recently as Hollow Knight: Silksong, but it’s not common. The one exception to that rule, though, is Activision and Call Of Duty.

For over a decade they’ve failed to send us, and most other websites, a review copy of each new Call Of Duty game until after it’s out. Some US sites have had access to Black Ops 7’s campaign a few days early, but we haven’t played anything of the game yet, outside of the beta.

Since it will be available day one on Game Pass we’ll have a review copy today, whatever happens, but the question is whether Activision is trying more than usual, to avoid word of the game’s quality getting out, or if they’re just being unhelpful out of a sense of tradition.

The obvious caveat here is that no company is under any obligation to send anyone review copies. But most of the time publishers recognise that the publicity is useful, especially as once aggregate scores are averaged out on Metacritic relatively few big name games ever score particularly badly. And while Call Of Duty is a popular punching bag in some quarters, and has seemed, as a franchise, rather directionless in the last few years, the overall quality has been remarkably steady.

Very few of the games have been anything less than competent and the only outright dud was 2023’s Modern Warfare 3, which was, very obviously, repurposed DLC, used to fill in a gap year when a full game was not yet ready.

Apart from the beta, we’ve seen and heard very little about Black Ops 7 (Activision hasn’t done any traditional press for the series since well before Covid) but it certainly doesn’t seem to be a Modern Warfare 3 style bait and switch, and we’ve no reason to think it’s not at least as good as last year’s Black Ops 6.

When a movie company prevents critics from seeing a film until the last minute it’s because they know it’s awful, but that’s not always the case for games. Bethesda were clearly trying to prevent low review scores for Starfield, but it still wasn’t a terrible game, and while Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was, that came as a surprise to nobody.

The reason Activision don’t send out review codes is not because the games are bad but because they calculate that there is little to be gained from a positive review but too much to be lost by negative ones, especially if they appear before the game’s release.

It’s cynical but they’re not wrong, since Call Of Duty has become a yearly institution where most people decide whether they want to get the game long before a review could be published, even in the best of circumstances.

We’re not expecting any major deviation from the series’ usual quality this year, but what everyone’s interested in is how the game will fare compared to Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders, and whether they will prove more popular.

Although it’s worth pointing out that it will be almost impossible to make any fair comparisons, because the only public numbers, showing how many people are playing the games, come from Steam and both Battlefield and Arc Raiders are very PC-friendly games, with a disproportionate number of Steam players, whereas Call Of Duty has never been particularly popular on the format.

That’s no doubt going to result in a lot of bad faith arguments over the coming weeks – so gird your loins for that – but there is definitely the scent of blood in the water, when it comes to a possible decline in Call Of Duty’s popularity. And if that did happen it would be see the collapse of one of gaming’s sturdiest pillars.

In recent years we’ve already seen FIFA/EA Sports FC wobble, so if Call Of Duty was to also show signs of weakness, then all bets are off in terms of guaranteed hits in the games industry. Well… except GTA 6.

Can COD still come out ahead of Battlefield and Arc Raiders? (Activision)

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