Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 launched last month to become the best-selling game of November in the U.S. by dollar sales. It's both a huge sales feat and a common Call of Duty W, as the franchise has topped the charts in its launch month every year for 18 straight years. However, it looks like its rival Battlefield 6 will reign at the top of the U.S. sales charts at year's end.
This comes from Circana's monthly report, which has Black Ops 7 debuting as the best-selling game of November and the seventh best-selling game of the year-to-date, behind Battlefield 6 at No.1, NBA 2K26 at No.2, Monster Hunter Wilds at No.3, Borderlands 4 at No.4, EA Sports College Football 26 at No.5, and Madden NFL 26 at No.6.
All of those games have a few more months on the market on Call of Duty, but it's still a lot of ground to make up in a single month, and Call of Duty's at a bit of a disadvantage. The game launched into Game Pass, meaning its actual dollar sales on Xbox consoles are much lower than that of its rivals as people use the subscription service to access it instead, and there's no good recent data on how Call of Duty's presence on the service impacts subscriptions.
It is worth noting, though, that Black Ops 7 doesn't seem to be doing as well as Black Ops 6, a fact that's reflected in everything from the critical review scores to fan response to European sales figures to Activision's own admissions. Circana reports that the Call of Duty franchise saw a double-digit dollar sales decline compared to November 2024, and Circana senior director Mat Piscatella tells me that November full game dollar sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 finished below those of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 last November, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launching in the October 2024 tracking period.
It is Piscatella's projection that Battlefield 6 is "extremely likely" to finish as the best-selling game of 2025 in the U.S. This would not be the only time Call of Duty didn't top the annual charts in recent memory. In 2023, Hogwarts Legacy defeated Modern Warfare 3, and that was with Modern Warfare 3 not launching into Game Pass. However, Black Ops 6 still dominated in 2024, and prior to that only Rockstar's GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 had been able to dethrone Call of Duty going all the way back to 2008's Rockband.
Given all that, it's perhaps unsurprising that Activision is considering significant changes to how it plans and releases its Call of Duty franchises year after year. Then again, while Battlefield 6 had an incredible launch, it recently introduced an update that broke the game in pretty significant ways across PC and consoles.
It was a weird November for all, I guess. Game sales in general had a shockingly weak November in the U.S., as we covered in our larger roundup of Circana's numbers. You can see what's going on and why gaming hardware and physical software just had the worst November since 1995 right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
