Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s battle royale mode, Warzone, continues to go from strength to strength. After having recorded an impressive six million players in its first 24 hours, Activision has announced that Warzone has now been played by 30 million 10 days later. The news comes by way of a Tweet from the publisher.
Over 30 million of you have dropped in to play #Warzone. Thank you to this amazing community .
Jump in and play for free now. #FreeCallofDuty pic.twitter.com/KFKhb8CNNK
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) March 20, 2020
It’s a figure that puts Call of Duty amongst the most played games in the world. By comparison, it took Fornite months to hit the same tally back in 2017 — though it should be noted that the battle royale genre was in its infancy at that time. Fortnite now has now seen around 250 million players, so it’s still the king of the hill overall.
A more recent and relevant comparison is Apex Legends, which hit one million unique players less than eight hours after launch last year and achieved the milestone of 10 million players and one million concurrent players within 72 hours. It went on to record 50 million players in its first month.
So Warzone has some catching up to do if it is going to truly rule top trumps, but it’s certainly well on its way. The key takeaway is that despite the battle royale genre becoming increasingly crowded, the game managed to carve out its own huge audience.
Of course, Call of Duty is one of the games industry’s biggest franchises, which means it’s always likely to see big player numbers in any game mode. What will be especially interesting to see is how long the game holds onto that player base moving forward.
