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Call of Duty: Mobile visits Nuketown with 100 million downloads in first week of release

Rust is the best map ever.

Call of duty mobile logo shown on phone screen
Image: Call of Duty

When I first heard of Call of Duty: Mobile I rolled my aging gamer eyes into the back of my head and went back to Candy Crush. That’s just me. I’m an old. I can barely play Call of Duty on a 55-inch television without getting smoked by 14 year-olds on the regular. Regardless of my feelings, Call of Duty: Mobile has now hit 100 million downloads in its first week.

Battle Royale is the new hotness and it was a matter of time before Call of Duty, one of the most popular FPS games ever to exist, got the mobile Battle Royale treatment. While the last major CoD release, Black Ops III, featured a Battle Royale mode, it was a bit surprising to see it move to mobile to compete with PUBG, Fortnite and Apex Legends.

Compete it did, as it destroyed those games’ first week downloads (26.3, 22.5 and 25 million respectively)

According to Reuters, 17% of the downloads came from the United States, with India close behind. The game is yet to be launched in China which is odd because the game was developed by Tencent, a Chinese based internet company that also has a hand in PUBG and Epic Games. Maybe recent changes to PUBG had something to do with it.

Meanwhile, the publisher of Call of Duty: Mobile is Activision Blizzard, which is facing its own set of problems. In addition to taking political sides (likely to appease its Chinese masters in Tencent), Activision cut a bunch of jobs this year as it focuses on its biggest franchises such as Call of Duty and Overwatch.

But all that really doesn’t matter to gamers, just political science majors and tech journalists. Gamers just want to stress out their thumbs and shoot other avatars on their mobile devices, as proven by the 100 million first-week downloads. As an old, it’s impossible for me to even consider playing Call of Duty on a mobile device, unless I’m carrying a 65-inch television with an Xbox strapped to my back.

This all leads up to a new Call of Duty hitting the shelves later this month, a reboot of the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare launched by Activision. I have no feelings about this. Call of Duty fell out of the killhouse a long time ago with the Black Ops franchise. The only good Call of Duty game ever was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, so unless someone is releasing a revamped version of that game for modern consoles, it’s a hearty shrug from me.

Regardless, the numbers presented by Call of Duty: Mobile are impressive and speak to a larger force at play. Gamers are embracing mobile more and more, to the point that game developers might want to heavily consider mobile versions of games earlier in the process. Gamers just aren’t playing on console or PC, they are taking their Nintendo Switch on the train, whipping out their iPhones and Pixel phones and gaming on the go.

Apparently they have better vision and dexterity than me, which I’m fine with at this point. I’ll always have Tetris.

What do you think? Plan on trying out Call of Duty Mobile? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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