Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 India Sales Slump Highlights a Bigger Problem
Also, Assassin's Creed Shadows pre-orders pay off, Lenovo's welcome retail focus, and Indian games industry's love for conflation.
In what seems to be a regular occurrence, Call of Duty’s relevance in India is on a steady decline. Following 2023’s Modern Warfare 3’s sales flop, many expected 2024’s Call of Duty Black Ops 6 to pick up the slack. This was far from the case.
While demand for Black Ops 6 was more than Modern Warfare 3, a combination of increased Xbox Game Pass awareness, higher than expected MRP of Rs. 5,599, and an efficient parallel distribution meant that of the 20,000 units officially shipped into India at launch, only 5,000 were sold officially at retail sources tell me. The rest were re-exported to other markets such as the Middle East by enterprising middlemen.
It doesn’t help that updates from developer Treyarch tanked the game’s player count with its player base dropping by 79 percent within two months of launch. And while quality is an overarching concern, many at retail point to a distinct lack of awareness.
Several store owners and executives highlighted that the game’s distributor Redington, wasn't interested in drumming up interest in-store or using any potential marketing activities to raise awareness for the game’s launch.
“We asked if there would be any marketing spend around the game,” says one retail chain manager. “We were told point blank to take a larger margin of about 20 percent and to push ourselves without any support. They seemed to think Call of Duty can sell itself.”
The end result was 90 percent of the 5,000 units sold were on PS5 with 10 percent being Xbox Series X. No surprise given that it’s next to impossible to even buy the latter in India right now. As for the balance quantity being shipped overseas, many pointed to the currency arbitrage allowing units at Rs. 5,599 less margins to be cheaper than what official product in regions like the Middle East cost.
“We ended up reducing our day one number by about 7,000 units,” says one UAE-based large-format retailer. “The moment we knew stock was coming in from multiple regions, it made no sense keeping so much official stock.”
All of this highlights a bigger problem at Activision: the inability to have a firm grip on its supply chain. Sony had these issues during the PS2 and PS3 era which were swiftly curbed. And while it’s not completely eradicated, it manages to do a better job where all parties profit cleanly without having to re-export a large amount of product.
There’s more in this dispatch courtesy of our sister site, High Chaos Run.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows India pre-orders pay off
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is out today but it ended up being the most pre-ordered game of 2024 and for now, of 2025. I won’t be surprised if a large chunk of that was due to the steel book given away with pre-orders at retail here appealing to value-conscious Indian buyers. Around 15,000 units of the game should sell in the first month with pre-orders being about 5,000 across all retail in India. The PS5 version accounts for about 85 percent of all sales.
Lenovo and Intel take to the stores to get Indians to buy gaming PCs
Laptop giant Lenovo has partnered with Intel to showcase the best of its new Legion and Aura line-ups on-ground at Lenovo Exclusive Stores across the country. Several workshops and tournaments will be held this month with an emphasis on raising awareness on gaming and AI. The duo have recruited a host of creators to get crowds in as well. Given both Lenovo and Intel’s premium positioning in the country, it’s heartening to see attempts like this to get Indian consumers to level up beyond the usual sub-50K INR laptops that dominate the gaming market and to convert existing mobile gamers to PC gaming. This follows the rather excellent Lenovo Tech World event held in Mumbai earlier in the month.
Indian games industry leaders don’t know what video games are
In the run up to GDC 2025, GDAI (short for Game Developers Association of India) decided to contort and conflate video games with real money games (RMG). The Indian market is still in its infancy particularly from a PC and console perspective.
Banks as well as payment gateway operators themselves seem to confuse video games with real money gaming, stymying commerce and genuine sales. However that hasn’t stopped the country’s only industry body for video game developers ignore this in favour of short-term gains.
This is a tone-deaf move following three crucial industry representations in the last year and half regarding draft IT rules which would have categorised video games as RMG, 28 percent GST to be levied on RMG (during which the RMG industrial complex tried making it sound like video games were in danger), and government representation for distinction between video games and RMG.
Several industry veterans point to GDAI’s leadership for this volte face. Perhaps a change in leadership is needed. Particularly if it means said leadership plays video games and understands what they are — and what they mean to the people making them.