NEW DLC 1 Teaser, Double XP is BROKEN, Black Ops 7 Underperforming, Creator Controversy, & More!
Hi guys, Black Ops 7 is already having its first DLC zombies map teased. The game seems to be underperforming and there are some interesting stories going around about creators being contracted to not play other games and instead only play Black Ops 7. But there’s also been some confusion around that story. So, we’ll get into that in just a second. First, our first story of the day is this. This is an official teaser for the Astra Malorum DLC1 map for Black Ops 7 Zombies, which is seemingly set in and around Thirsten Planetarium. You’ve got this little exhibition sign for January February 1910, and it says Josiah Shem’s ritual dagger. So, they’re doing an exhibit of these items, which were super relevant in other parts of the Modern Zombies story timeline. And I think this is actually really cool. It’s a rare instance where I feel like we’re starting to see the interconnectedness of the modern zombie story, which is really something that’s been lacking, I think, over the last couple of years. Now, granted, it’s just a poster. We’ll have to wait and see, but Treyarch saying, “The blood spilled by this blade paved the way for our own ascension in quotes here makes me think that maybe we’ll be getting a trailer or a teaser for this fairly soon that might even feature that line as part of an intro cut scene, perhaps.” Like imagine if the intro was Shem doing a ritual or something and we saw hell break loose and then we like broke into that ritual hellbreaking. Like there’s a lot of options for some cool stuff here. Next is Black Ops 7 underperforming. Like is that happening right now? Well, in terms of YouTube viewership, yes. If we take a look at this chart, it’s the comparison of my first 48 hours of the tomb Easter egg guide and first 48 of the Ashes Easter egg guide. and the tomb is clearing it by miles. And that’s the tomb. That’s the least popular Black Ops 7 map. The thing it’s tracking in closest comparison to is my guide to the Reckoning Easter egg. And Reckoning is still beating it despite the fact that this game is a full game. We have a whole brand new video game for Ashes and it’s still doing worse than a DLC at the end of the Black Ops 6 life cycle where everyone stopped playing the game already. That is not a good sign. And granted, this is just me and my data, but you can see this across the whole industry. And that’s why I made this video, which is titled Black Ops 7 is embarrassing based on the fact that Charlie made that exact video called Black Ops 7’s embarrassing. And it’s the highest performing Black Ops 7 video on YouTube this week. Despite the fact that we’ve got so many creators making videos about the game, it’s a video talking about it being embarrassing that’s actually doing the best. Everybody else’s views are down. Now, one of the ways people like to measure this underperformance is via the Steam charts. And you can see that the opening launch weekend of Black Ops 7 featured a peak of around 100,000 players. When you compare this to Ark Raiders, they’ve had peaks of 480K, and they’re doing this day on day on day on day on day, and it’s just growing. So, Arc Raiders is doing really well on Steam. The caveat to this though as pointed out by booby screenshot is that I’m not sure who says everyone you got to realize that BO7 is available on Xbox PC Battleet and Steam. So I thought to myself, okay, well let me gather a bit of data myself and we can see if we can make this a bit more of a complete statistic and and interpret things a bit better. So I asked you guys on my YouTube community tab, what platform are you playing on? And I got this breakdown with 35,000 votes, which is a pretty good sample size. And it’s actually really interesting because the Battleet portion being 4% is no surprise. Steam is 15% in my numbers here. And then PlayStation, which is normally the most played platform, is actually underneath Xbox now that you include Game Pass as well. There seemed to be a very significant portion of people that would have been playing the game on another platform perhaps that have switched over to playing on Game Pass now. And that’s meaning that what would normally be PlayStation 60 65 or 70% of the console player base and Xbox the rest now the tides have slightly turned. It looks like that Microsoft purchase of Activision has maybe worked out pretty well in their favor here. But aside from that, the fact that Steam is at 15% of the total might mean that you would try to infer that well, if Black Ops 7 is peing at 100K concurrence on Steam, then maybe it’s peaking at 1.5 mil concurrence globally across platforms. The problem with that is we don’t know if the Steam player kind of activity is going to work the same way as the console player activity. those players might play at different times and there also might simply be a whole load of of of error bars here on this little sample that I’ve taken that mean that these numbers are actually way off. I mean, there’s only so much that we can infer from a little poll like this. And that’s why I’d love for you guys to vote on on this on my community tab, but at the same time, what we really need to see is some sales data from console, and that will help to flesh out the bigger picture as well, which will come in time. Now, speaking of Arc Raiders and Call of Duty sort of being compared to it, the nominees are in for the 2025 Game Awards for best multiplayer and COD didn’t even make the list, bro. It’s not even there. Ark is there and Battlefield are there, and those are the main contenders, I think, fighting against Call of Duty. It’s interesting to see Split Fiction there as well. And I’m I’m I’m happy for these other games, too, don’t get me wrong, but yeah, I I I I think it’s quite funny that Black Ops 7’s been snubbed in that regard. But for many people, they saw this coming. Like Apollo here says COD has had it coming. Battlefield’s community deserves this win. While Call of Duty refused to listen to its audience with excessive microtransactions and the collabs, skill-based matchmaking, and straying so far from its identity, Battlefield capitalized. Happy to see it. But the flip side of that is you then have people like Shooter here being like, “Hold up. you either haven’t played it or you just suck because the game is actually great and I’ve played both and honestly COD is back. And I have seen a lot of this online where there are a lot of tweets like this kind of like claiming victory from the Battlefield side of things for example, but then when I stream and I ask people to rate Ashes, for example, I see a ton of people saying, “Yeah, it’s like an eight or an 8.5 for me.” Like people really enjoy the map. So maybe it’s just that the zombies is fine and other parts of the game are struggling, but it just it almost feels to me like the COD community is more fractured than ever. It can’t really decide what’s good and what isn’t, whether it’s back or whether it’s never been more jo. And honestly, that sort of filters into some of these sorts of conversations as well. So this initial story has been sort of debunked, but then there’s actually a twist that means it’s maybe not debunked. Okay, so the rumor started with this clip from Cloy, which I’m just going to play for you now, chat. He can’t he he can’t play COD. I mean, he can’t play Arc Raiders because he has a week-l long COD ad and he can only play COD for a week. Everyone point and laugh at him. So, that was on Cloak’s stream and it was then confirmed by Cloyy that he was trolling and that he doesn’t believe those streaming COD are prevented from playing other games. And then Nate shot responded and said this. I can play other games by the way too. I go play Arc Raiders right now. It’s literally It’s literally not even accurate. Why would he do that? Dude, Cloak is a idiot, bro. Yo, Dennis is an idiot, brother. So, the Cloy story was like thoroughly debunked, but then Tom Henderson came in and said, “Hold on, this is interesting because I was pursuing this as a story four to 5 weeks ago.” Back then, some agencies were enforcing a no compete to creators where they couldn’t stream any other game in the same genre during the contract period, even if they wanted to play organically. Activision PR even told me over the phone that this is normal in the industry, but I’ve only ever heard of it in the mobile gaming space, not AAA. Regardless, these no compete clauses can be negotiated out. Perhaps this is a story for another time, but creators have seen some of the biggest dollar signs ever for sponsorships these past few months. Competition is good. Now, I’ve done several sponsorships over the last several months, so I can kind of give you guys some behind thes scenes info on how some of this stuff works. Yes, these deals do exist. I can confirm that I’ve done deals myself and I’ve seen deals come across my desk where the brand will say, “We want you to stream this game.” And that’s the only game you can stream that day. And not only that, but sometimes they’ll say you can neither stream another game that day, nor can you post another video of another game that day. You can’t do anything of any other stuff that day. You just have to do what we are paying you for. And this is actually pretty normal, I would say, as a clause that a lot of brands will put into their deals. It’s not something that is very common in my experience. Usually this particular clause is not included, but it’s normal to the point that like if I see it, I’m not like, “What the hell is that?” It is just something that does happen. And if somebody like uh Nadesh shot was going to be streaming Arc Raiders and then Call of Duty and bouncing between the two, it would obviously be in his interest to up his rate on the Call of Duty deal if that meant that he wasn’t going to be able to stream Ark cuz there’s a massive opportunity cost there, especially because Ark is another possible sponsor for him. But in another world where Nade is planning to do a 24/7 grindathon of Call of Duty for those first seven days of launch, if he’s doing it anyway, he doesn’t necessarily need to stress as much about the fact that there might be a no compete course. Like these things eb and flow. It’s dealtode deal. It’s every single time. It varies and it varies on the creator. It varies on the brand and what the brand is going for. The brand might have specific weird legal reasons why they don’t want to be posted on the same day as another game. Like there’s all sorts of stuff that happens here. and it’s complex. If you want me to kind of pull the curtain back more and talk about this sort of behind the scenes stuff more in the future, then I absolutely can do. I mean, like I said, I’ve been doing this for a very long time. A lot of my overall income comes from my brand relationships as well as from all of the content that I make via AdSense and stuff like that. So, I can talk about that in more detail if you guys find it interesting. But, yeah, it’s it’s it’s a complex one and this story has has kind of ballooned in a way that I’ve found quite perplexing perhaps. Now, next we’ve got a double XP story that’s kind of gotten a bit controversial cuz we thought that double XP tokens were not working in zombies, right? And Treyarch have looked into this a little bit and they’ve asked this guy to share his Activision ID and he says, “Thank you. We’re monitoring XP earn rates in zombies to ensure that they’re in line with player expectations and other modes. We’re currently observing that double XP is calculated as intended.” Which just doesn’t really make sense to me. It says if you have double XP active in zombies when the match ends, you’ll receive the double XP icon pop-ups during the progression portion of the after action report. but just before it shows the total XP earned. If double XP expires during the match, the double XP icon will not show up during the after action report, but you’ll still earn double XP for the time during the match where the tokens were active. The problem is there’s a dozen people here saying, “No, you’re just wrong. Still not working. XP gain is noticeably slower than it was before. XP in zombies is definitely not very good. It in fact does not work. Lol, you lied. Man, if it hasn’t been working, that’s insane. I’ve used so many like I feel like it’s not working right now because the XP earn rate is horrendous and especially for augments. Oh my god, they take so long to earn and I kind of like the idea of not having all of them in just like one weekend, but bro, they are slow as hell right now. So, leave a comment if you agree. Augment XP earn rates should be buffed. Next quick one. A GTA 6 insider has claimed the game is so ambitious other developers will be unable to match what Rockstar are doing for 15 to 20 years. That sounds just insane, right? But it would also explain why they keep having to delay the damn thing because what’s going to happen is they’re going to delay it for 15 years and then other developers will be able to match it because the game will finally be ready. But yeah, I’m looking forward to it releasing. I’ll definitely do some content on it for sure. But I mean, yeah, this is a pretty bold claim. And next, I saw this tweet from Perker saying, “Disappointed that there’s no relic hunt streams happening.” I’ve definitely been doing some relic hunt streams. Like, I did that for about I don’t know 10 hours yesterday or the day before. But the problem is that it’s much more fun hunting when there’s open access for everyone. And the fact that it’s limited to only people that have completed the Easter egg means that if I’m streaming, I’m kind of incentivized to do the thing that the viewer can do. Like, if the viewer can be attempting the Easter egg and they can see me doing the Easter egg, they’re like, “Cool. Okay, perfect. This is sort of in line with my experience. But if I’m playing a mode that they don’t have access to, or if I’m doing a thing that they can’t see in their game at all, it can be, I think, a little alienating. So, I’m going to be doing more Relic Hunt streams, don’t get me wrong, but I think that’s part of the reason why there’s fewer streams happening is because a the viewership on the game actually has been ass. And that just does hurt. That means that it’s less easy for me to juggle multiple things at once because there’s just not any revenue there for me to pay my team. And then B also, uh, yeah, I mean, I I I kind of am having to focus on some of those those those core videos and things like that because that’s what people want and that’s my job at the end of the day. But I I I still agree that it’s it’s it’s it’s sad that there’s not a ton of viewership on relic hunts right now. I think my question to you guys would be, should relics be earnable without Easter egg completion, even if they’re not equipable without Easter egg completion? Cuz right now you have to do the main quest Easter egg and then go into cursed and then you can hunt for relics. But should Treyarch make it so that you can go into cursed mode without Easter egg completion and you can hunt the relics without Easter egg completion but you can only equip the relic if you do the Easter egg in standard first? Like should that be the way round so that everyone can participate in the hunt or is it good to gate it behind quest completion to encourage people to do the quest? There’s there’s really no right answer here. I think it just depends on your personal preference and and and viewpoint. But I’d really be curious to get those opinions down in the comments down below. Also, last thing for me on this video is I got a message from Gamers saying that you guys were going bonkers on the free samples and they are making sure that they’ve got a good amount of stock. So, if you haven’t picked up those already, you can go to the description of this video, click the Milo free link, make an account, add them to Basket, use code Milo, and they’ll be completely free. No shipping cost, no credit card required. You just get free stuff sent to your house, which is a pretty good deal. So, give that a click. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the news video today, folks. And let me know if there’s any other stories that I missed, I suppose, and I can cover them next time. Thanks. I’ll see you then.
Is the community overreacting?? Are we hyped for Zombies DLC 1 already?! Leave a comment 🙂
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