The great duel between Halo, Call of Duty and Battlefield

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The video game horse race to watch this fall is between Call of Duty: Vanguard, Battlefield 2042 and Halo Infinite, three shooter games from giant franchises that continue to clash with each other on the road to release.

Driving the news: Two of the expected mega-games will intersect tomorrow, as Activisions Vanguard and EAs 2042 will both showcase online at 11am ET to reveal new modes.

One measure of relative interest: Twitch Gamesight’s monitoring service recorded the number of views for games that have recently completed playable betas. Halo peaked with 82K concurrent viewers, Call of Duty with 182K viewers, Battlefield with 340K.

Current Situation: The three shooters have superficial similarities but will test distinct business models.

Activisions Call of Duty: Vanguard (console, PC), starts November 5th.

Vanguard takes the franchise back to World War II, will retail for $ 60 $ 70, and includes a story-driven campaign and numerous multiplayer modes. It’s unclear whether ongoing investigations and lawsuits into Activision or exhaustion with the franchise will drag performance. CoD does not usually address two major alternatives launched in the same season. What to Watch: Activision runs Call of Duty as a multi-game activity, using its most popular free battle royale Warzone to promote and feed players in the $ 60 versions. “Call of Duty: Vanguard.” Image: Activision

EA Battlefield 2042 (console, PC) will follow on November 19th.

You can guess when the game is set. It will also sell for $ 60 but will only include multiplayer modes, focusing on large-scale competitions involving virtual soldiers and vehicles. 2042 is the only one of the three without a currently announced free-to-play option that powers players, but even if it doesn’t get one, it has a hungry fan base that has been waiting for a sequel for years. What to Watch: Battlefield has arguably the most shaky path, as EA has missed a September date for its beta, has postponed the full release of the games from October, as it is clear that the game is coming “Battlefield 2042”. Image: EA

Microsoft’s Halo Infinite (Xbox, PC, Cloud Gaming) goes last, December 8th.

The sci-fi games multiplayer mode will be offered for free, but Microsoft will charge $ 60 for the campaign (or players can receive it at no additional cost if they subscribe to Xbox Game Pass). Infinite was due out last year and won’t even be out on November 15th, which is the 20th anniversary of the Halo franchise. But a bad portrayal of the gaming campaign last year has given way to a well-received series of multiplayer tech tests this fall. What to Watch: All the signs indicate that the free multiplayer portion of Infinite is a success, but the campaign mode, generally a big selling point for this series, has barely been shown in the last year.

The big picture: the competition here is not zero-sum and it is not even closed to external competitors.

All three games will also compete for attention against a number of other popular games in their category and with power players on other platforms. For example, Activision oversees Tencents’ huge Call of Duty: Mobile, which market tracker Sensor Tower tells Axios has generated over $ 350 million in user spend. But the game faces stiff competition from Garena’s Free Fire mobile shooter, a non-US hit that is now attracting a similar number of monthly users to “CoD” in the US.

What’s Next: Release days for the three games will come and go without a final winner, as all are designed to be digitally expanded with new modes for at least a year beyond.

So if someone stumbles, they will have a lot of chances to recover.

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