Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard and executive at Microsoft, reckons Battlefield 6 will ‘boot stomp’ Call of Duty Black Ops 7 when it launches later this year, forcing Activision to improve its “lazy” first-person shooter juggernaut.
Speaking on X, Ybarra believes that while Battlefield 6 will emerge as the victor in the clash of FPS giants this year, it will be beneficial as a whole for the genre, believing we’ll get better games for it.
Battlefield will boot stomp [Call of Duty] this year. But the real win here is [Call of Duty] won’t be lazy anymore, and we’ll all get better FPS games for it.
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What I meant by boot stomp is it will review better and drive urgency from the CoD team like never before. Player counts you can’t use because CoD is free on Game Pass. Which makes it interesting to see if it will sell close to CoD – maybe so. But I’m not wrong – more competition will make CoD better and I’m all for Battlefield doing that. It shouldn’t take that – CoD is lazy… 130GB+ installs, slow UI, incredible cheating on and on… they need to fix it. The only way they will is through competition.
Interestingly, it was reported by Insider Gaming last week that Activision is keeping an eye on its leading competitor, but is not overly concerned about Battlefield 6 as it believes Call of Duty is simply too big to fail.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has not yet attracted a release date, but will be showcased during GamesCom Opening Night Live next week. Battlefield 6 meanwhile is slated to hit PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S on October 10, 2025. The game received its first Open Beta phase over the weekend, which recorded over 500,000 concurrent players on Steam and resulted in the series’ biggest open beta to date.
[Source – Mike Ybarra on X via VGC]