Activision has declared Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Grand Theft Auto 6 “the two biggest games of the year” — explicitly sidelining The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake in the process. The statement comes from Tyler Bahl, Activision’s Chief Marketing Officer, in an interview with The Game Business published Thursday evening.
No official sales figures, market share data, or third-party analytics back the claim, it is a marketing positioning, not a measurement. But it lands amid a crowded fall slate where GTA 6 pre-orders are surging globally and Nintendo’s Zelda remake is already trending on Switch 2 launch day. Activision isn’t just naming rivals.
It’s drawing a line: social play across platforms. Including, for the first time, Switch 2, is its differentiator. Zelda may be iconic. GTA 6 may be seismic.
But Modern Warfare 4, per Bahl, is the one bringing lapsed players back to their consoles. ‘More people taking the dust off their Xbox or PlayStation and starting to play again’. That’s the metric Activision is optimizing for. That campaign mode launched yesterday for pre-order customers.
DMZ drops Sunday, October 20. Full release is Wednesday, October 23. The game is out on Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and, new this year. Nintendo Switch 2.
That last detail matters. It’s the first mainline Call of Duty on a Nintendo console since 2010. Bahl also confirmed Modern Warfare 4 will not be on Xbox Game Pass at launch, unlike last year’s Black Ops 7. Microsoft removed it from the service to ‘simplify how you can get Call of Duty’, he said.
Instead, Activision offered Xbox buyers a 10% loyalty discount and an exclusive blueprint. No price was disclosed in the source reporting. No regional pricing. Rs, $, or €, appears anywhere in the material.
So none appears here. This isn’t a hardware story. It’s not about chips, latency, or cloud streaming. It’s about shelf space, attention, and who gets to define ‘biggest’.
And right now, Activision is betting hard that ‘biggest’ means most played. Not most praised, most anticipated, or most remembered.
GDFiled by The Games Desk
Consoles, handhelds, PC gaming and the platforms and hardware behind them.
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