Is COD Cold War Worth It?

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War was released in November of 2020, but it wasn’t all that well received. While the reviews were generally quite favourable, the community behind Call of Duty was somewhat split, and a debate erupted as to whether or not Cold War was actually good. For some, it was a perfectly balanced title, but for others, it was the worst Call of Duty game that had been released in years. Today, we’re here to answer that all-important question: is COD Cold War worth it?

Even almost two years after its launch, Cold War still has a relatively strong player base. This is mostly driven by the fact that Vanguard suffered from a terrible launch window, with fans abandoning it remarkably fast after it had been released. Although there are no more updates rolling out for Cold War, many players still prefer it to Vanguard because of its more enjoyable, colourful, and somewhat simpler multiplayer experience.

So, is COD Cold War worth it in 2022? Let’s find out.

Do People Still Play COD Cold War?

It’s incredibly difficult to lock down exact player numbers for any Call of Duty title. As this is one of the key data points required to determine whether or not Call of Duty is dying, Activision naturally likes to play the numbers close to its chest. On the older Call of Duty titles, there was a tracker that would show how many people were online at any given time, but that has long since been removed.

However, if we look at social tracking platforms like TwitchTracker, we can get a rough idea of how popular a game is in terms of stream viewership. Typically, the more people that are watching a game on a platform like Twitch, the more popular it is overall. As you can imagine, some of the best COD games dominate these platforms and consistently rank quite high up the charts, but how do the older titles perform?

For Cold War, there’s an average viewership (7 days) of around 1,380 users. By comparison, Vanguard has a 7-day average of around 2,300 – so there isn’t all that much in it. It’s a close fight, and the only thing that keeps Vanguard in the lead is that it’s the current Call of Duty title. But, with that being said, people certainly do still play Cold War – there are likely tens of thousands of players online at any one time.

But Is COD Cold War Worth It?

Throughout history, all Call of Duty games have been ‘worth it’ to someone at some point. While they have their lifecycles and they eventually die out of circulation, there’s always a player base that will enjoy a Call of Duty title. Of course, there’s also that portion of the community that will hate every Call of Duty title, but for some reason, will still pick up the annual release. When Cold War was released, these two sides of the community were extremely visible, and the game presented the most tangible split that the community had seen for years.

There were several positive points to Cold War, the first of which was the relatively strong COD esports scene behind it. Then, there was the continuation of the ever-popular Black Ops story, which features some of the best COD characters in franchise history. It had a considerably balanced, bright, and enjoyable multiplayer platform that performed quite nicely, and for the most part, it was very stable.

And then to top it all off, COD Cold War featured one of the best COD Zombies experiences we’ve ever seen.

There are plenty of games like Call of Duty on the market right now, but honestly, there’s nothing wrong with COD Cold War. As it’s an older title, you can likely pick it up in a sale, and there’s still a lot of content there to be enjoyed.

Is COD Cold War worth it? Absolutely.