Activision Says GTA 6 Won’t Kill Call of Duty — It Will Help Modern Warfare 4

✅ CONFIRMED

Call of Duty is walking straight into GTA 6 season — and Activision is not flinching. In an interview with The Game Business, chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl declared Grand Theft Auto VI and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 the “two biggest games of the year”, dismissed the Zelda Ocarina of Time remake as a lesser contender, and argued GTA 6 will actually help Modern Warfare 4. With MW4 out today, October 23, and GTA 6 landing 27 days later, the two biggest shooters on Earth are about to find out if he’s right.

Quick answer: Activision CMO Tyler Bahl told The Game Business that GTA 6 and Modern Warfare 4 are “the two biggest games of the year” — “no offense to Zelda” — and that GTA 6’s hype will benefit Call of Duty by pulling lapsed players back to consoles. His pitch rests on differentiation: GTA 6 launches without multiplayer on November 19, while CoD’s strength is its social, play-with-friends experience across PS5, Xbox, PC and Switch 2.

Key takeaways

• Activision CMO Tyler Bahl told The Game Business that GTA 6 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 are “the two biggest games of the year”.
• Bahl added “no offense to Zelda” — explicitly ranking the Ocarina of Time remake (November 5, Switch 2) below both games.
• He argues GTA 6 will help MW4: players dusting off consoles for Rockstar’s game expands the audience for everyone.
• His differentiation argument: GTA 6 launches single-player only, while Call of Duty’s edge is social play with friends across every platform.
• The claim comes with baggage — Black Ops 7 finished seventh in 2025 US sales, the worst Call of Duty ranking since 2008, per Circana.

What did Activision’s Tyler Bahl actually say?

In the interview with journalist Chris Dring for The Game Business, Bahl was asked whether the GTA 6 and Zelda Ocarina of Time remake launches could create a “Barbenheimer”-style phenomenon that overshadows Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 4. His answer, quoted verbatim across GameRant, TheGamer, LevelUp and glitched.online coverage: “Well, no offense to Zelda, but I think GTA VI and Modern Warfare 4 are the two biggest games of the year.”

Bahl went further, claiming Rockstar’s blockbuster is good for Activision’s business. “The more people who get access to consoles, the more people who dust off their Xbox or PlayStation and start playing again, the more that will expand the audience for us overall,” he said. And in a second quote picked up by fpshub and glitched.online: “If more people are talking about games and there’s more media coverage, that’s good for everyone. Not just us.” The interview is corroborated by a BBC Newsbeat piece published October 23, which notes Activision is positioning Modern Warfare 4 as a return to form while GTA 6 approaches.

Why does Activision think GTA 6 helps Call of Duty?

Bahl’s logic is that GTA 6’s gravitational pull brings lapsed players back to their consoles, and some of them stick around for everything else — including Call of Duty. He named three specific differentiation points: GTA 6 launches on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S first with no multiplayer modes at launch, while Call of Duty is available on PS5, Xbox, PC and — this year, for the first time — Nintendo Switch 2. That multiplayer gap is real: Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick confirmed at the September 17 shareholder meeting that GTA 6’s online mode arrives after launch, as we covered in our GTA 6 single-player-only launch piece.

The deeper pitch is philosophical rather than tactical. “What makes Call of Duty endure over time is the community and the social experience,” Bahl said. “When we look across our studios and ask ourselves, ‘What is the most exciting thing about our games? Is it the gunplay?’ The answer is that it’s spending time with friends.” Activision’s internal research, he added, shows the main appeal of its games is friends being there — the “unique opportunity” of cross-platform play from Switch 2 to PC. It is a deliberate contrast with Rockstar’s solitary Leonida story, where Jason and Lucia’s two-person relationship is the emotional core.

What does the sales data say about this claim?

The claim lands with real baggage. According to Circana, cited by the BBC, Black Ops 7 finished seventh in the 2025 US video game sales rankings — GameRant notes that was the worst end-of-year ranking for a Call of Duty title since 2008’s World at War, and launch sales were reportedly 50% lower than expected. AFP reporting adds that Battlefield 6 outsold Black Ops 7 last year, while Embark’s Arc Raiders became a surprise success competing for the same hours.

That is exactly the hole Modern Warfare 4 has to climb out of — and exactly why the BBC describes it as a “return to form” play. Pre-release previews of MW4 have been positive, per GameRant, but skepticism is warranted: being “one of the biggest games of the year” is Call of Duty’s historical default, not a guaranteed outcome. On the GTA 6 side, the demand numbers are almost comical by comparison — Sensor Tower tracked 6.45 million pre-orders and roughly $630 million in revenue as of October 23, with Take-Two’s CEO calling pre-orders “astronomical”. Bahl is right about one thing: when that many people turn their consoles back on in November, somebody benefits.

How close do the two launches actually get?

Modern Warfare 4 released today, October 23, 2026 — 27 days before GTA 6’s November 19 launch. That is close enough for launch-window competition but far enough apart that the two games’ opening weeks barely touch. The real squeeze is on the games caught between them, as we mapped in our Great GTA 6 Release Evacuation piece: Nintendo is the only publisher still holding November (Zelda Ocarina of Time remake, November 5, Switch 2), while Edge of Memories fled from November 5 to December 3 and Fable, Danganronpa 2×2 and Lords of the Fallen 2 all moved out of the blast radius entirely.

The schedule explains Bahl’s confidence better than the quotes do. MW4 gets nearly a full month as the marquee shooter before Rockstar’s story even starts, and its multiplayer loop is precisely the experience GTA 6 won’t offer at launch. Whether players “bounce between the two titles” — Bahl’s prediction, reported by glitched.online — or simply migrate to Leonida on November 19 and never look back is the question the next month answers.

What this means

This is the most honest articulation yet of how the industry’s biggest players are coping with GTA 6’s gravity: not by fighting it, but by drafting behind it. Bahl’s argument is really about redefining victory — Call of Duty doesn’t need to beat GTA 6 to have a successful year; it needs the total number of people playing games to grow, and nothing grows that number like Rockstar. The GTA 6 release date of November 19 is 27 days away, and the next few weeks will test every prediction in this interview.

The fan reaction suggests Bahl’s “no offense to Zelda” line was the real misstep — GameRant’s Instagram reel on the story drew hundreds of defensive comments from Zelda fans arguing the remake’s historical acclaim outweighs an annual CoD release, while others conceded GTA 6 sits alone at the top regardless. In other words: fans ranked the games exactly the way Bahl did, just with Zelda second and Call of Duty third. Watch whether that ranking survives contact with GTA 6’s November 12 pre-load.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• JournalArta (BBC Newsbeat summary, Oct 23)
• GameRant (Oct 16)
• TheGamer (Oct 15)
• Glitched Online (Oct 16)
• LevelUp (Oct 18)
• fpshub
• Tech Insider (BBC competitive context, Oct 23)
• ixbt.games (Oct 15)

Every claim above was verified against the outlets listed, all covering the same The Game Business interview with Activision CMO Tyler Bahl conducted by Chris Dring, plus the BBC Newsbeat piece of October 23, 2026. Quotes are carried verbatim from the multi-outlet reporting since The Game Business interview text was not directly accessible in this run. The Black Ops 7 sales ranking comes from Circana via the BBC; the “worst since 2008” framing comes from GameRant. Social engagement figures were observed directly on GameRant’s Instagram and Facebook reels of October 21–22.