After months of anticipation and hype, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was released to much fanfare the world over. Set in 1991 during the Gulf War that attracted a global spotlight, players look to stop a shadowy clandestine force that has infiltrated the highest levels of the CIA, branding anyone who resists as traitors.
The latest installment in the legendary Call of Duty series has so far received positive reviews, with most players and pundits praising its lengthy campaign mode. This early success has also seen it climb up the livestreaming charts on the first day of its launch, especially on Twitch.
At the time of writing, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was the number two game on the Amazon-owned platform by watch time and peak concurrent viewership when counting stats for October 24 and 25. After all, some regions, like New Zealand, got their hands on the game early thanks to time zone advantages.
Only the evergreen Grand Theft Auto V was ahead on both counts, with only the Just Chatting genre ahead of both titles when looking at overall segments. When looking at just the release day stats, i.e., October 25, the multiplayer shooter jumps to the second spot on the overall table for Hours Watched and third for Peak Viewers. This puts it ahead of prominent names like League of Legends, Minecraft, and Valorant.
As mentioned above, the game's campaign mode has come in for special praise from most quarters, with a majority believing it has helped make Black Ops 6 the best Call of Duty offering in years. This positive feedback was vital given the tanking of 2023's release, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, which logged the weakest release day viewership of any CoD title since 2019.
With a lot of the release day still left, Black Ops 6 should not have any issues passing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III's mark of 3.3M Hours Watched. In fact, it will do well to finish near the 5M HW mark, which is pretty good considering that 2024's most successful video game release, Black Myth: Wukong, touched 5.5 million HW on its launch day of August 20.
Switching topics back to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, apart from the campaign, it has three other modes: Multiplayer, Zombies, and Warzone. Each has its own features and items to unlock, ensuring that players will not have a shortage of activities to go through in order to advance further in the game and their inventory collections.
The favorable reception has largely been thanks to the cast of streamers playing the game. Star names like Scump, TimTheTatman, and eliasn97 have already poured hours into the game, with the former OpTic Gaming pro-turned-content creator emerging as the most-watched and most popular name over the last two days.
These influencers have shown off a lot of the gameplay and features that are on offer in Black Ops 6. The likes of Swagg have already unlocked the gold camo for various weapons, with another popular online star to do this, Reidboyy, also being the one to unlock Modern Warfare 3's most coveted camo after a near-76-hour grind last year.
Of course, there have been some expected roadblocks along the way, like the game not working on Steam for some time. Other issues included crashes, errors, stutters, lags, and FPS drops, but a series of patch fixes from publisher Activision has ensured most of them have been addressed.
The game was also banned in Kuwait a few days before its global launch, with authorities not explicitly giving any reasons. However, most social media users speculated that Black Ops 6 was blocked due to the setting of the 1990 Gulf War between Iraq and US-led coalition forces.
It must be remembered that under Saddam Hussein, Iraq invaded Kuwait during the Gulf War, and the subject remains a sensitive one in the region. Activision did reveal that Kuwaiti authorities could reconsider their decision, but for now, fans in the region will not have access to the shooter.
To conclude, Activision and developers Raven Software and Treyarch can rest easy at the end of the release day knowing things have gone well. However, there are bound to be more challenges that pop up, and how these companies handle them will go a long way in securing Black Ops 6's long-term future, especially on live streaming.
