Kids aren't playing Black Ops 6 and that's made it so much better

A reader suspects that the average age of Call Of Duty players is rapidly increasing and suggests it’s made Black Ops 6 a more enjoyable game.

It was mentioned the other day that Call Of Duty has been dominating the games industry for 17 years now, which I took to be a reference to Call Of Duty 4. That was certainly a milestone moment for the series, and gaming in general, but Call Of Duty has actually been around since 2003 – which is a bit odd because I don’t remember them really making a fuss about the 20th anniversary last year. Maybe they were too embarrassed over Modern Warfare 3.

But I was there from the start. I remember playing it when it was a PC-only game, with almost no multiplayer (just some eight-player mode, according to Wikipedia, but I admit I don’t remember it having even that). The point I’m hopefully getting across is that I’ve been playing and enjoying Call Of Duty games for a long time.

I don’t say that to paint myself as some mega fan – I like it but it’s not my favourite franchise – but to emphasise that I have been playing these games for the majority of my life. Or to put it another way, to have enjoyed all the Call Of Duty games from the start you’ve got to be in at least your 30s, since I can’t imagine younger children having any interest in it, when it was still a fairly serious WW2 simulator.

This brings me (slowly, admittedly) to Black Ops 6. I’ve been playing it since launch and I do agree that it is the best one since at least the Modern Warfare reboot. However, I’ve seen many people making the same surprising comment: that everyone playing the game seems to be suspiciously good at it. The so-called ‘sweaty lobbies’ problem, where they’re filled with what seem to be veteran players from day one.

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The natural assumption is that this is a combination of broken matchmaking and cheats but while there have been reports of cheaters, I don’t think there’s any suggestion that the game has such a major fault that it’s only ever matching you with the world’s best and/or most dishonourable players. I think it’s just that everyone’s older now and we’ve all been playing Call Of Duty for so long it’s like second nature.

Because the other weird thing is that there’s far less children playing the game than ever before. Back in the heyday of the original Modern Warfare, the game was absolutely dominated by sweary teenage boys, and it was very clear that they were the majority of the audience. But this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

It’s not hard to imagine why, given the many new distractions in the world in the last 20 years, both in and out of the video game world, but I think it’s an acknowledged phenomenon that younger folk today are much more likely to play a game on their mobile. Which I would assume means the idea of spending £70 on a console game, a version of which they can play for nothing on their phone, is not all that appealing.

Maybe there’s also something about Call Of Duty itself which isn’t connecting with the younger generations. I couldn’t tell you if that was true but from my personal experience it seems that most Call Of Duty players now are adults. I find it hard to guess what the average is, but I would imagine it to be late 20s at least, and possibly much older.

And I have to say it’s made the game better. Not just because there’s less squeaky-voiced tweens constantly trying to outdo each other in terms of the amount of swearing and bigotry they can spew, but because everyone now seems to take the game much more seriously. I don’t think the multiplayer has really changed that much at all in Black Ops 6, it just seems better because the people playing it are generally more sensible.

Whether this affected the design of Black Ops 6 I don’t know. Although I guess maybe Activision felt more confident that their audience would know who Bill Clinton is or what the Gulf War was. Whether they’ll make other games with older gamers in mind I don’t know, but I’m certain a publisher as business savvy as Activision is not going to miss the fact that their audience is starting to get grey hairs.

It’s an interesting change that has implications for all games, but I think it is most obvious in Call Of Duty because its potential younger audience is being siphoned off to free mobile games like Warzone, PUBG, and, of course, Fortnite. I look forward to the next Call Of Duty being sponsored by Werther’s Original.

By reader Gunther