A staggering 52% of US Xbox Series X|S players launched Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 the Monday after release, analyst says: "Bonkers engagement"

It looks like Xbox's big bet on Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is paying off. One industry analyst has revealed that over half of active Xbox Series X|S players in the US all played the new FPS on the Monday after launch.

"According to Circana's Player Engagement Tracker, on Oct 23rd, 19% of US active Xbox Series players and 18% of US active PlayStation 5 players launched Call of Duty HQ," Mat Piscatella says on Bluesky, highlighting how many people were jumping into the COD ecosystem prior to Black Ops 6's launch. "On October 28th, 52% of active XBS players and 34% of active PS5 players did so. Both were all-time highs for Call of Duty HQ."

In other words, among every single person in the US who turned on an Xbox Series console on Monday, over half of them played Call of Duty. "Over HALF of all daily active players on a platform playing one game is bonkers engagement," Piscatella notes. The previous record for this metric was 34% of Xbox Series players, set on August 31, 2024, and 27% of PS5 players, set on September 7.

Today, Microsoft announced that Black Ops 6 is the "biggest Call of Duty release ever," which you can attribute at least partly to the game's day one debut on Xbox Game Pass. But the company also noted that "unit sales on PlayStation and Steam were also up over 60 percent year-over-year," so clearly there's a whole lot of momentum behind this return to Black Ops even without the boost of a subscription service.

Check out our Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 review and then take aim at our guide to the best SMGs in Black Ops 6.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.