Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: activision, black ops, Black Ops 4, call of duty, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Post Malone, treyarch

Why Post Malone Streaming Blackout Won't Increase Call of Duty's Popularity

In a strange bid to increase the celebrity power of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Activision invited Post Malone onto the official COD Twitch channel to play the game alongside popular streamers LEGIQN and COURAGE. The three hopped into the game's battle-royale esque Blackout mode for a lengthy stream.

Obviously, the move is pretty much a straight copy of that time Drake hopped on Ninja's Fortnite stream and absolutely smashed Twitch's concurrent viewer record.

At the time, anyway. Ninja has since demolished that record a few times over.

This isn't the first celebrity tie-in Activision has tried for Black Ops 4, in fact, they've brought in Clay Matthews and Von Miller for ads, and they even released a trailer with Post Malone a few weeks back. In fact, their entire YouTube presence lately has been bizarre #CODNATION videos with streamer and celebrity cameos with bad photoshop and weird in-jokes. Just looking at it makes you wonder what madman was given control of the COD YouTube password.

And while Black Ops 4 has sold better than any other Call of Duty game in terms of digital sales, it still isn't going to beat out Fortnite. Sure, Black Ops 4 has been doing well on Twitch this week, but we hit peak COD saturation years ago. The franchise is a Fall mainstay and that's great. People love Call of Duty and they have since the original PlayStation was the best console on the market.

There's really only so much market presence a game can have, and I think we hit the wall here a long, long time ago.

Additionally, Blackout is only one of the things that makes Black Ops 4 a good game. It hinges on the backbone of Call of Duty's traditional multiplayer modes, which have been incredibly successful across several iterations of the game, as well as its longstanding Zombies mode. Sure, it's the newest thing to hit a Call of Duty game in years, but as far as battle-royale modes go, Blackout is not exactly worldshattering.

Fortnite has been so successful for such a long time because it is actually something new. Sure, PUBG may have done the battle-royale thing first, but Fortnite added the ability to build walls, rooms, and traps into the mix which creates an all new set of PvP skills a player needs to have. Blackout just means you have to be really good at traditional COD multiplayer. Sure, it requires an impressive amount of skill, but that's skill people have had generations of games to work up to. And that makes it a bit more ordinary.

Also, let's be real, Post Malone just isn't that cool.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!