Why there’ll be no Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 review today

GameCentral explains why there’s no Black Ops 6 review ready for launch day and why Microsoft is so desperate for the game to be a hit.

As the non-stop marketing makes very clear, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 is out today. Unlike with most new releases though we won’t be able to bring you a review this week, because we’ve not been sent a copy of the game early. As far as we understand that’s going to be the same for every other outlet, at least in the UK.

It’s not unknown for publishers to withhold review copies, when they suspect it won’t be received well and they want to manipulate the aggregate review score on sites such as Metacritic – as famously happened with Starfield last year.

Thankfully, that sort of thing is rare but in the case of Call Of Duty it’s not necessarily because Microsoft or Activision think they’ve got a dud on their hands. Last year’s Modern Warfare 3 was awful, since it was basically just souped up DLC, but generally the Call Of Duty games have maintained a remarkably high quality over the years.

The beta was certainly quite promising and while we haven’t played anything of the story campaign yet it seems to be entertainingly bombastic, if the trailers are anything to judge by. (Which, admittedly, they may not be.)

We’ve got access to the game now, so we’ll try to do some kind of first impressions article today, but our full review will have to wait until sometime next week.

Activision and Microsoft may be trying to hide the game’s quality but more likely they just feel there’s more to lose from risking negative reviews than there is to gain from positive ones.

That cynical logic does rear its head occasionally in the games industry and in the case of Call Of Duty it’s not hard to see why.

If even rubbish like Modern Warfare 3 can do well then it seems Call Of Duty games really will sell no matter what they’re like, so from the publisher’s point of view there’s no point in inviting any dissenting voices.

Activision certainly didn’t send out copies of Modern Warfare 3 early and although their approach does vary from game to game, they’ve been reticent about sending out Call Of Duty review copies before launch for well over a decade now – so today’s no-show is not much of a surprise.

It’s especially unsurprising given how important Call Of Duty is to Microsoft now. Not only do the majority of Xbox profits now come from (multiformat) sales of Activision Blizzard games but they’re hoping that the release of Black Ops 6 will see a significant boost to Game Pass subscription numbers, since it’s available from day one for everything but the Standard tier.

In other words, there’s a lot riding on Black Ops 6 and if it is a disappointment in any way then Microsoft will want to keep that quiet for as long as possible. Hopefully they’re just being overly cautious though, because it’d be nice to see the franchise sell because of its quality rather than just its name.