NOBODY is playing Advanced Warfare

..The PC Version at least. I haven't played in months, gave up. How can Activision in good conscience put out DLC for it on PC at this point considering that it's a ghost town? At peak times i can only barely find a game on team dm and domination! Also FORGET finding a DLC game. How is Call of BLOODY Duty struggling this bad? You'd think the name alone would supply at least an IV drip of a lifeline of players on PC, enough to find A game in MOST playlists. Of course I'm guessing it's because of Sledgehammers stupid decision NOT to add server browsers, dedicated servers or allow mods as well as the SHIT PILE that was Ghosts that killed the PC community. But STILL! It's a CALL OF DUTY GAME. You'd expect SOMEONE would be playing? What's going on? At this point you'd be paying a ridiculous price to rent maps you will maybe play occasionally whilst the playlist ts up if your lucky then never again. It seem all kinds of shady!

I think the core cod audience is on console. The last one I played on pc was modern warfare 2.

I think you answered your own question- PC version communities trickle off a lot faster than the consoles. It does seem faster than usual for AW. Sad since it sounds like the best one in a good while.

CoD 4 still has a fairly busy community, i take it.

I was playing on PS4 yesterday and found myself wondering the same thing.

It's probably because I have a poor Internet connection and my NAT type is always listed as moderate but I was struggling to find matches in TDM and domination as well. I don't have any of the DLC, though. So that might also be why I'm not finding a lot of people.

I think the first Black Ops is still the most popular CoD game on PC. Same might be true on consoles, too.

Black Ops 2 has the biggest FPS online playerbase on consoles. Just over the weekend the Xbox 360 version alone had over 100,000 people playing it and it usually averages well over 80k+ daily.

Ghosts and Advanced Warfare usually top out at 5-10k.

I find it really puzzling that Treyarch is making Black Ops 3 with a futuristic shooter/jumpy gameplay style even though Advanced Warfare and Titanfall have such terribly small communities.

@castermhief117: same here, i read a lot of complaints about how bad it is that everyone is using jetpacks in their game and when those same complaints have followed Advanced Warefare release I thought that Activision might drop it and leave the jetpacks mechanic to destiny. Not to mention the low player base of Advanced Warfare in comparison to other COD games (besides ghost).

Two things (note I am an Activision shareholder):

A) According to NPD, the 360 version was the one that sold the most and PC was the least. I need to dig through some of the documentation Activision sends shareholders, but I believe those confirm NPD.

B) Most of the COD audience is still playing Black Ops II. In fact, it is still the most played game on Xbox Live.

So I think this is more of a platform and target audience thing than a lack of caring about COD anymore. It was still the most successful game of 2014, sales-wise.

Fun numbers time! Looking at the Steam & Game Stats page, I've pulled the current daily peak player counts for the various CoD games on Steam:

7,579 for Call of Duty: Black Ops II - Multiplayer (This is the most played CoD game today and has 48th highest peak player count on the list overall.)

4,265 for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - Multiplayer

3,444 for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - Multiplayer(This is the third* most played CoD game today!)

3,238 for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Multiplayer

3,171 for Call of Duty: World at War (I think this includes the multiplayer but it's not listed separately like the other games)

For comparison, the second most played game on Steam at the moment is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with a peak daily player count for today of 524,835

Really strange that Advanced Warfare is so low on the list. Is there a way to be playing the game without activating it on Steam or something? Aside piracy of course.

Side note: Evolve isn't even on the list.

*Edit: Realised I had the list sorted by current player count and not peak player count. Changed that. Advanced Warfare is the third most played CoD game today, not fourth like I had originally posted. Although it's only around 200 players difference.

@paulmako: I don't think it helps that Call of Duty games never go on any kind of meaningful sale, I feel like if they did there would be at least some more people playing them.

Twice as many people are "playing" Clicker Heroes than all Call of Duty games combined.

p.s. Clicker Heroes is great.

Keep in mind that both Ghosts and Advanced Warfare had pretty high system requirements, with a minimum requirement for 6 GB RAM and recommended 8 GB. The vast majority of PC gamers don't actually have high power gaming rigs or the likes, and most budget priced/mid tier pre-built PC's up until very recently had 4 GB RAM, it's probably only within the last year that 8 GB budget PC's have taken over. For the longest time even 32 bit machines were dominant, and they can't even address any more than 3 GB RAM.

All the top played games on Steam are games with fairly low minimum requirements, allowing them to be played on older machines and laptops, and up until Ghosts, the Call of Duty games ran fine on such machines.

That's definitely why I've never purchased one.

To be fair CoD has such strong marketing and Brand recognition, I don't know if they would get a meaningful sales bump from a steep sale. They'd certainly move more units, but would that mean more net revenue at the end of the day? I dunno. I do think their is business value in trying to maintain the perceived Value of your product ala Nintendo.

But the obvious upside might be a larger pool of online players

Honestly I'm amazed Activision never turned Blizzard's Battle.Net into a Uplay/Origin storefront service to help put core Activision titles on PC. As much as I prefer not to have another client, they would have the benefit of commanding the attention by being the only game in town on that client. By being on Steam they have to compete with literally thousands of games for the attention of gamers.

@bobafettjm: 50% is meaningful. That's when I've always bought them.

Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't know about the 6GB minimum requirement. I can't run it, that's for sure. I presumed that they would have tried to keep the game requirements in line with what most users had. I guess they do well enough on consoles to wait for PCs to catch up.

System requirements and price points are still huge factors in determining initial purchases. The lack of sale discounts means new players aren't joining to help increase the numbers.

Side note, we can't measure a games success by pc player count nine months after release. I'm sure Activision/Blizzard are savvy enough to know what they are doing and how Steam sales work. I guess long term PC player count isn't a priority for them.

Is this accurate? For comparison, and since @castermhief117 brought up Titanfall's "terribly small community", there are 7100 people playing Titanfall right now (Xbox One).

Adavanced Warfare was only ever popular on PC for two months. If Acti didn't put out the DLC they'll get accused of withholding content from PC players, better to let it die a quite death.

http://steamcharts.com/app/209660

Btw OP it sounds like you're pretty much calling it shady for the game to not have the community it should. Do you think they didn't do a good enough job promoting the game and thus the onus is on them or something? I think you can basically chalk this up to the diminishing returns of the series finally catching up to it. And like it's been said there'd be a real stink if they didn't make the dlc available, even with a dwindling community able to play it. Just sounds like everyone's too quick nowadays to make some anti-consummerist conspiracy mountains out ot molehills.

@notnert427 said:

It's accurate for Steam and for the last 24 hours, so take from that what you will. I'm sure there are far more players on consoles. As @fisk0 pointed out, no worries about system requirements there. I just thought it would be interesting to see how they rank on Steam.

@thepanzini I didn't know about that steamcharts site, that's really interesting.

No they don't. TF2 is still the 3rd most popular game on Steam and that's 8 years old. Garry's Mod is in the top 10 and it's 9 years old. Just because CoD isn't popular on PC doesn't mean PC communities 'trickle off fast'. Hell, up until last year, the original Counter Strike from 1999 was still in the top 5 most played games on Steam.

@chaser324: I believe the server based ones are still going strong.

@alexw00d: specifically meant CoD games.

It's not diminishing returns because COD sales are still relatively strong. I think it's a testament on how the Titanfall model of multiplayer gameplay doesn't really hold people's attention for long.

PC communities on the whole tend to not stick with new FPS MPs unless there's a strong hook to it. Titanfall on PC died incredibly quickly. I personally see no point in jumping into a new FPS MP game if my favourite go-to game for that, TF2, still has a very strong community.

I wonder what these numbers would look like if you included the non-Steam versions (be they cracked or otherwise). COD4 has a large number of players who wouldn't show up on this list. Would be interesting if anyone owns this games and could jump in and check the in-game player counts.

There was a pc patch that broke matchmaking for a week or something a while back and then the player base gave up apparently that's been fixed now but no one has bothered to return. I was affected by this tried playing again but yeah same results as you it's now dead couldn't even find a single match

This make me sad because Advanced Warfare was a great game. The matchmaking was broken early on, though and the PC Master Race people were pissed about no dedicated servers. At lot of <1hour played steam reviews just saying "NO DEDICATED SERVERS THE GAME IS TRASH DON'T BUY IT. KEEP IN MIND I'VE NEVER ACTUALLY PLAYED IT I ONLY LOOKED AT A MENU". That kinda bullshit stuff.

You have to remember there are a TON of other shooters on PC (and lots of them are free). Plus there is a ton of "PC Master Race" wankery going on, ether because the PC version of COD is known for not having dedicated servers, or because its seen as a game for "console kiddies"(not my opinion but I have heard it expressed). Plus in all honesty this is what the 12th Call Of Duty game? they dont matter like they used to. And as far as the DLC thing goes, there are still a lot of older PC gamers that will not pay money for things they used to get for free.

I think the lack of dedicated servers thing is a stupid argument though, have you ever played a dedicated server match of a CoD game? there are always 4 too many people on each team and grenade spam just makes it unfun. Kinda like how people set the death timers in TF2 to instant even though it completely fucks the games balance.

Everybody is playing Rocket League.

Did you just clickbait-ify the title of this thread? What the heck

You won't believe how many people aren't playing Advanced Warfare!

I found nearly ever COD playerbase to drop off pretty hard...on PC. In terms of the consoles, you could find enough people playing all of them. I did notice significantly less people playing Ghosts and Advanced Warfare on consoles though. No surprise...those are the worst two in recent memory (outside of maybe World At War).

@dizzyhippos: COD on PC population has always died within a year it will never get deicated servers. PC Master Race is a meme not a thing most people have a low end PC, look how many games in the steam top 100 need decent hardware to play.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Shooter communities (that aren't cs or tf) die so fast on PC. Titanfall, evolve, and AW all had super fast deaths on PC. I will no longer be buying shooter on PC, I'll just get them on the bone or ps4 from now on.

Last time I checked (which was a few months ago) Evolve had, like, 600 active users.

Man, what a blunder.

I'm probably in the minority, but I wish it was customary for a Call of Duty game to ship with an offline bot mode in which you can enjoy the XP progression. The original Black Ops had it, as did Ghosts, and it meant that I could return to those games at any time and still get an experience that is not too dissimilar from the standard multiplayer. In years past I've even went as far as modding out the older Call of Duty games to add bots.

@bobafettjm: Actually Activision has been discounting AW like crazy over the last 6 mo. I feel like every 2-3 weeks, that game is on sale for 15-20% off (might not seem like much but considering most of the other CODs never got any sales period until YEARS after they came out, it's pretty big).

@ripelivejam: I just meant that it's odd to sell DLC which cant really be used.

@enigma777: But my point is that while other games will get 75% off sales, the absolute lowest COD games seem to go is 50% off and that is usually after 1 or 2 newer games are out. I won't buy a COD game unless they go cheaper and I am sure I am not the only one.

@cairnsythebeard: Advanced Warfare has had barely any sales on Steam.

https://www.steamprices.com/us/app/209650/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare

@enigma777: They can't not release the DLC people would have bought the season pass, Acti had know way of knowing how well AW was going to sell.

@bobafettjm: i got them on disc very cheap off amazon, they all link to steam anyway. I've seen Black Ops II for under £15.