The disparity between these two leagues can’t solely be explained by Twitch viewership. The 2019 Call of Duty finals drew a peak concurrent audience of just 182,000 on Twitch, according to The Esports Observer, and this year’s 330,000 figure was actually a record for the franchise. In terms of live esports audience numbers, Call of Duty can’t compete with League of Legends, and it consistently struggles to keep up with comparable first-person shooters like Counter-Strike or even Overwatch. 

Activision’s solution? Change the metrics.

“We did have to change our mindset,” said Brandon Snow, who leads Activision’s esports partnerships, including its relationship with YouTube. “We had to move away a little bit from, ‘Hey, it’s all about how many people are watching at any one time,’ to, ‘It’s all about how many people are engaging with our content on the platform.’ Part of that is live and we’ve had some good live numbers, but part of it is also the content, and the shoulder content, and the VOD content that we put around it.”

Snow has been with Activision Blizzard for nearly three years, and before that he worked in traditional sports as an internal profit consultant for the NBA. He talked about maximizing the YouTube platform by pushing out fresh, entertaining videos that extend the brand and weave narratives around players, casters and popular personalities. The Call of Duty League YouTube channel reflects this effort, with videos like How to get the MOST kills in Warzone?! and IT’S CHAMPS TIME, WHO WILL BE CHAMPIONS?! (plus a few more titles that may or may not make sense with “?!” ending punctuation). 

In this ecosystem, streaming a match and publishing the VOD is only part of the equation. It’s about creating original content, engaging and retaining viewers, and attracting people who aren’t drawn to live matches on their own.

“That’s a much different mindset than just running a live-event business on a platform like Twitch,” Snow said. 

Activision’s quest to engage new viewers on YouTube reflects a broader strategy to expand the Call of Duty audience. With last year’s Modern Warfare, this meant making the game more friendly to new and casual players, with less of a focus on competitive features — tricky, when simultaneously attempting to establish an esports league. Modern Warfare still doesn’t have a ranked mode, and developers at Infinity Ward said they designed its maps to be easier for new players to navigate.

The reason Modern Warfare has trash maps is because they were designed to give new players a “safe space” to camp in LMFAOOO look how stunned he is when asked if the hardcore fans will be affected by this pic.twitter.com/kNy0bVGOmO

— Anthony (@OMGItsBirdman) October 31, 2019

These moves have pissed off plenty of competitive players, including 100 Thieves CEO and former Call of Duty pro, Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag. He laid out some of his issues on an episode of The Mobcast in November, saying, “They made this game so that a casual player would have a great experience and that the best players and competitive players would have a negative experience.” 

Nadeshot continued, referencing his former team, “If OpTic is not playing in the finals, there’s like 40,000 people watching a tournament. And I’m not even trying to sound like an asshole, that’s just the reality. …They have this thesis that if they create this league, they’re gonna have like 500,000 or a million people watching a Call of Duty tournament.” He called that idea “insane.”

This is all piled on top of recurring concerns about the league’s stability, partially tied to Activision’s annual release schedule for Call of Duty games, which means the competitive scene is uprooted each year. Star talent like Scump and FormaL are aging and no one is showing up to replace them. Players and fans are growing increasingly vocal about Activision’s perceived mismanagement of Call of Duty esports. 

“They’re very passionate,” Snow said. “We learn a lot from that passion, and quite frankly, they have a lot of good ideas that we need to be very mindful of.”

The rebranded CDL held its inaugural season in 2020, alongside a new competition format, minimum salaries and benefits for players, and a location-based franchise model, with teams spending a reported $25 million apiece to participate. Twelve teams competed in 2020, and after a mid-year format change, all of them were ushered through to the playoffs. 

Activision is playing a multi-pronged game, and esports are only part of it. Call of Duty is a blockbuster franchise outside of the pro scene, and its support systems are mainly geared toward engaging that massive, core player base, not catering to the smaller competitive crowd.

On YouTube, this means dropping more story- and personality-driven content in VOD format. The goal, Snow said, is to expand the CDL audience by creating videos that will attract lapsed or casual Call of Duty fans, and pull them into the pro scene. 

Naturally, this also means diversification. Right now, the CDL audience is heavily male, with a large concentration in ages 18 to 35.

“We absolutely have to diversify and get more broad in who engages with the league,” Snow said, noting that inclusion was one of the top objectives for himself and CDL Commissioner Johanna Faries. “We want to deliver what the core likes to see, but we wanted to find ways to engage a broader audience, I’ll call it a casual gaming audience,” he said.

Snow described the Call of Duty market as a dartboard with 200 million points, or fans, on it. Hardcore players are the bullseye, but there are plenty more points in the surrounding layers.

“We’re very much focused on, how does the product we put out there in CDL not only engage with the center of our bullseye, but just tapping into that 200 million will help us engage a massive audience that should be much more broad than we are today,” Snow said. “And I think we’re laser-focused on figuring that out. And hopefully we’ll be trying a bunch of different things next year, around different products we’ve got in the Call of Duty franchise to help us get there.” 

He didn’t specify what those products would be, but he talked about ongoing efforts to expand the Call of Duty brand, like Call of Duty Mobile, Warzone and Cold War. The goal is to stay true to the franchise while simultaneously adding components to tempt casual players, maintaining a robust competitive scene, and growing a new league exclusively on YouTube.

“It can be a balancing act, but we believe it’s possible,” Snow said.

As part of its PlayStation 5 showcase on Wednesday, Sony featured a new campaign trailer from Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, talking up its support for ray tracing, 120Hz refresh rate and HDR on the new console. However, before it comes to the PS5, the developers announced a PS4-exclusive multiplayer Alpha test happening this weekend, “complete with multiple modes, maps, and a preview of the Create-a-Class and Scorestreak systems.” If you can’t wait a couple of days, then just read through Jessica Conditt’s experiences in Cold War’s neon-tinged multiplayer setup that posted last week.

Surprise! Get your hands on the #BlackOpsColdWar PS4 Multiplayer Alpha this weekend!
Watch for pre-load and more details tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/vF01SUGVML

— Treyarch Studios (@Treyarch) September 16, 2020

According to developer Treyarch Studios players can expect more details tomorrow, which is also when the test program will be available for preloading to help players maximize gaming time instead of downloading and installing. You can start your preloads on September 17th at 11AM ET, before the test is available between Friday afternoon (9/18 1PM ET) and Sunday afternoon (9/20 1PM ET).

Also, it’s not like that’s a bad thing. Call of Duty remains at the top of the sales charts every year because Activision has perfected the formula for a blockbuster FPS, and players keep coming back for more. The main driver of this sustained interest is multiplayer, and with Black Ops Cold War, developers at Treyarch and Raven Software are on track to deliver another successful installment of online, rapid-fire entertainment.

Cold War introduces new modes to multiplayer, including VIP Escort, Combined Arms and Fireteam. In VIP Escort, two teams of six alternate on attack and defense, and one player on the attacking team will be selected as the VIP. That person gets a special loadout consisting of a pistol, smoke grenades, frags and a field mic, and they’re the main target for the defending team. On the attack, players must protect the VIP and get them safely to one of two exit points, where a chopper is hovering with a rope dangling below. It takes a few seconds for the VIP to rappel up to the chopper, standing still at the base of the rope, and this is often their most vulnerable moment.

I played a few rounds of VIP Escort during the Cold War alpha media preview last week, and while the premise was clear, my team’s communication was not, and that made the mode feel particularly haphazard. Rounds were quick, even on a large map like Crossroads, which has big abandoned buildings, wide-open fields and tanks to commandeer. Snipers took down my VIP (and me) multiple times with no warning, and the team around me moved more like a chaos mob than a regimented fighting force. VIP Escort requires coordination and communication, and it’ll be particularly interesting to see highly skilled teams tackle this mode in esports and streaming settings.

Activision

The standout mode of my Cold War demo session was Combined Arms, particularly when played on the Armada map. Combined Arms Domination is a large-map mode supporting two teams of 24 players and five to six capture zones. Control the designated zones to earn points for your team, and the first side to 400 wins.

Armada is an oceanic map, with jet skis, half-sunken vessels and ziplines running between massive military ships floating on the Black Sea. There are endless perches for snipers on the ships, and securing a kill underwater is far more fun than it has any right to be. With multiple capture points scattered across the map, it feels like a fantastically high-stakes game of hide-and-seek. 

We didn’t get a chance to try out Fireteam, another new mode in Cold War. Fireteam supports 40 players, in 10 teams of four, on big maps only. It has various objectives and game types, including something called Dirty Bomb, which developers have promised to show off in the coming weeks. The spawn system in Fireteam operates by its own rules, allowing players to parachute onto the map, rejoin a teammate not in combat, or appear in the passenger seat of a squadmate’s vehicle.

If you hop into Call of Duty: Warzone right now, you’ll notice that all of the vehicles are missing. Over the weekend, players discovered a game-breaking glitch. To fix it, Infinity Ward temporarily disabled all vehicles, Eurogamer explains.

A playlist update is rolling out now across all platforms! This update temporarily removes all vehicles from #Warzone.

— Infinity Ward (@InfinityWard) September 6, 2020

The glitch allowed players to drive any vehicle out of bounds at a specific point on the map. A “return to combat area” warning appeared on the screen, but players could keep driving the vehicle, though they couldn’t get out or do much else. After about 30 seconds, the game would end, but not just for the player who drove out of bounds. The game would shut down for the entire lobby, which in Warzone can hold as many as 150 players at once.

Call of Duty esports centered around four-player teams for many years before the 2018-2019 World League season. Indeed, the move marks a “return to our roots,” CDL Commissioner Johanna Faries suggested in an announcement. “This decision was made in close collaboration with our teams and players, and it was not made lightly.”

The league will reveal more plans for 2021 — including details on maps, formats and the schedule — during the offseason. There’ll also be a shift from Modern Warfare to the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

Meanwhile, there’s a bit more CDL action on the way this year. The All Star Weekend takes place from September 12th-13th, which could mark the last time fans will see pros compete in five vs five matches anytime soon. The 2021 CDL year starts the following day.

The question was asked for the same likely reason Activision has never greenlit a Call of Duty game dedicated to The Vietnam war: The US military’s actions in Vietnam were atrocious and widely regarded as a massive mistake. 

Fueled by anti-communist sentiment, the US government aligned itself with South Vietnam in the mid-1950s, and the conflict functioned as a proxy war against the Soviet Union and China, both of whom backed North Vietnam. With the world’s most advanced military technology at its disposal, the US obliterated Vietnamese soldiers and civilians for 19 years, while making negligible progress against the North and seeding deep divisions at home. 

In Vietnam, US orders were best summarized as, “kill anything that moves.” During the infamous My Lai Massacre in 1968, US troops slaughtered more than 500 civilians over the course of four hours, stopping for a lunch break in the middle. US planes dropped the explosive power of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnamese military structures and villages. Throughout the conflict, US attack helicopters, carpet bombings and heavy artillery killed as many as 3 million Vietnamese people, 2 million of whom were civilians. By the end of US involvement, 58,000 American soldiers had died, many of them marginalized in everyday society and drafted against their will.

Activision

The US retreated from Vietnam in 1973, bloody, victoryless, and with a generation of traumatized soldiers to support — or, as was often the case, to completely ignore. 

By nature, every war is gruesome, ruinous and inhumane, but Vietnam represents a particularly dark mark on US legacy. In Vietnam, this conflict is called the American War, or the Resistance War Against America. 

Kraft, Cold War’s lead writer, acknowledged this history at the very beginning of the preview, saying, “We’re also going back to 1968, to a dark period of American history, the Vietnam war.”

If there ever was a moment for a non-lethal option in a Call of Duty game, the Vietnam war might just be it. It’s not like this is a new idea for the CoD squad — Infinity Ward implemented a non-violent option in the 2009 Modern Warfare 2 level “No Russian,” which allowed players to participate in a mass shooting at a busy airport. There’s also a Vietnam war level in the original Black Ops, also developed by Treyarch, and there’s no option to navigate that battlefield non-lethally.

Activision

It’s unclear just how much of Cold War takes place in this Vietnam war nightmare land, so perhaps it is laughable to consider letting players sneak their way through these scenes. Or maybe there’s a plot point tied directly to the number of Vietnamese soldiers that players gun down. After all, if Treyarch is aiming for authenticity, that would fit. As the US Army didn’t have a clear indicator of progress throughout the Vietnam war, it used body counts to measure the success or failure of any given mission.

Such a mechanic would be ridiculously tone deaf, even for Call of Duty. Overall, it seems Treyarch and Raven are approaching Cold War’s Vietnam storyline the same way they’d handle any other battle scene in any other installment: authenticity only to the point of entertainment. Discomfort isn’t the goal. Playability is. 

To that end, the Vietnam scenes look engaging, lush and mysterious, with a surreal edge that makes them stand out from classic Call of Duty fare. History adds a twinge of unease to the scenes of US soldiers slaughtering Vietnamese people, but for the majority of players, it’ll pass unnoticed.

Activision

Besides, most people pick up Call of Duty every year for multiplayer, not the single-player campaign. To that end, Cold War will support cross-platform play, a new Zombies mode, and shared content with Call of Duty: Warzone, Activision’s battle royale franchise. Cold War and Warzone will have shared progression features as well — but that’s basically all Activision, Treyarch or Raven have confirmed for now. The Call of Duty Twitch channel will share more information about non-campaign things on September 9th.

There are three versions of Cold War available to pre-order today: the Standard Edition ($60), Cross-Gen Bundle ($70) and Ultimate Edition ($90). The Standard version unlocks the game on Xbox One, PS4 or PC, while the Cross-Gen and Ultimate bundles activate the game on next-gen console counterparts as well.

Treyarch and Raven were an unlikely pairing for Cold War. Sledgehammer Games was originally scheduled to create this installment with Raven Software, but that partnership fell apart in 2019 and Treyarch stepped in. This speed bump, alongside a global pandemic that’s shifted the business models of most industries, could’ve spelled disaster for Cold War. Instead, it seems Treyarch and Raven have firm control over their own version of the Cold War, and all of the atrocities they want to inflict on it.

After trying to make a statement about modern warfare, the Call of Duty franchise is returning to a more distant conflict. On Wednesday, series publisher Activision shared the first teaser for Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War (proper title punctuation to be determined).

Activision promises to share more about the new entry, including gameplay footage, on August 26th. Until then, the teaser provides a couple of hints about the game’s story. Consisting mostly of archival footage of a TV interview with KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, the teaser says the story is “inspired by actual events.” Text interspersed between the footage mentions Perseus, a Soviet spy who allegedly infiltrated the Manhattan Project during the height of World War II to steal secrets related to the atomic bomb. Perseus, it turns out, was never caught and may have worked their way into the highest echelons of the US government.  

Also new are Exterior Ascenders attached to the facades of some tall buildings. You might have encountered vertical ziplines in some structures’ elevator shafts, and these are similar except they’re on the exterior. They should get you to rooftops faster.

Activision Blizzard/Infinity Ward

No prizes for guessing what the Mini Royale mode is all about. It’s a faster-paced version of the main battle royale mode with fewer players and shorter games — it includes only the typical events from the first and last five minutes of a regular battle royale match. In addition, there are weapon updates and tracks from Modern Warfare you can listen to while you’re in a vehicle. The songs unlock immediately if you buy the latest Battle Pass.

As for Modern Warfare, Infinity Ward is adding four free multiplayer maps at the start of the season, including an oil rig and the Verdansk International Airport from Warzone. The latter is a Ground War map. You can expect more game modes, missions, challenges, playlists and weapons as well.

There’ll be a few more Operators to unlock through the Battle Pass and store. A free trial of Modern Warzone multiplayer starts this Friday too, at 1PM ET, and will run until the same time next Wednesday.

Season five of Modern Warfare and Warzone will go live on August 5th, likely at 2AM ET. PlayStation 4 players can pre-load the patch, which is probably a wise idea if you’d like to play as soon as possible, given how hefty the update is yet again.

If you have the latest version of Modern Warfare and Warzone installed on your console, Activision and Infinity Ward say it’ll weigh in at 33.9GB on PS4 and 49.8GB on Xbox One. When it’s all done, the game(s) should take up less space on your console’s hard drive. On PC, the patch will be 54.2GB if you own Modern Warfare and 47.4GB if you’re a Warzone-only player.

These are the two Doritos Double XP promotional images that I was DM’d earlier from an anonymous source for Call of Duty 2020 Black Ops Cold War. I was too worried about copyright issues to post them earlier but since CharlieIntel shared them I (assume?) they’re safe. pic.twitter.com/yvvjH7CvKU

— TheGamingRevolution (@TheGamingRevo3) July 26, 2020

While nothing has been confirmed at this stage, leaks have suggested it may take Modern Warfare’s grittiness one step further. The title will supposedly explore the Vietnam War from the perspectives of the US, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong, with excursions to other parts of the world. The game might also be the product of corporate drama, with Treyarch apparently taking over after Raven and Sledgehammer fought over the title.

Treyarch co-head Jason Blundell also left the studio after 13 years, although his March departure was late enough into development that it might not have affected the upcoming game in a major way.

Whatever game arrives, the announcement will come relatively late. Activision has historically announced Call of Duty games at or before E3 in June. With E3 cancelled, however, the publisher hasn’t had to stick to that timetable. An announcement might also be affected by the expected fall launches of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, provided the game takes advantage of them. Don’t be surprised if Activision takes its time, then, no matter how accurate this leak may be.

Modern Warfare players will have some other goodies to check out. There’s a fresh multiplayer map, Cheshire Park, and the return of an old Call of Duty game mode, Team Defender. The latter’s a spin on Capture the Flag, in which flag carriers earn points while they hold onto the objective. You’ll find more bundles in the store as well, including new operator Roze. 

The update will arrive just a couple of weeks after Season Four started. It’ll go live tonight at 11 PM PT (2 AM ET).

You’ll need plenty of free storage space to install it, however: it’ll measure between 22-36 GB, depending on whether you have Modern Warfare installed or just Warzone, with a secondary download of about 3.5 GB for console players. After you update, the total install size for Modern Warfare will be slightly larger, and that of Warzone will be a bit smaller.