Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra spends his time these days heading up a technically-not-gambling daily fantasy sports company, but that doesn’t mean he’s bereft of thoughts on videogames. Late last year he opined that Marvel Rivals is just an Overwatch ripoff (which did not sit well with PC Gamer’s Elie Gould) and now he’s back to say that this year, Battlefield 6 is going to stomp Call of Duty’s guts out.
He actually used the term “boot stomp” but given the subject matter—military shooters—I think my choice of wording is more on-point. Anyway.
“Battlefield will boot stomp CoD this year,” Ybarra wrote on X. “But the real win here is CoD won’t be lazy anymore, and we’ll all get better FPS games for it.”
He defended his pick in a subsequent reply post, saying Call of Duty “has gone downhill for years” since Infinite Warfare in 2016. ” It’s a mess. Cheating, heavy UI/install, rainbow colors. People are sick of it. Luckily BF will force them to change it.”
I generally take exception to any characterization of game developers as “lazy” and that holds here too, but at the same time it’s hard to argue that Call of Duty hasn’t become rote and routine. Black Ops 7 almost feels like a parody title—seven of them, really?—and 2023’s entry (because 2024 was Black Ops 6) was the second sequel of a reboot of a Call of Duty “sub-series” from 2007. I still wouldn’t call it lazy, but stagnant? I may be biased—I’m not a Call of Duty fan by any measure—but I’d say yeah, absolutely.
The other part of Ybarra’s big bet is the real question. Can Battlefield 6 finally score the win over Call of Duty it’s been chasing pretty much forever? Early signs are positive: The open beta has already made it the most popular Battlefield of all time on Steam, and more importantly PC Gamer’s resident Call of Duty expert Morgan Park has declared that “Battlefield 6 is making an excellent case to skip Call of Duty this year.”
Which doesn’t guarantee anything, because the real challenge Battlefield is facing is simple inertia. Call of Duty is a habit for an awful lot of people, and the great(?) thing about habits is that we do them without thinking. If Battlefield really knocks it out of the park this year, and Call of Duty continues to coast, that could absolutely set the table for a real power shift in future years. But a full-on stomping this year? Seems like a long shot to me.
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