Call Of Duty: Warzone Hits 30 Million Players, Gives Away Free Pizza

After just 10 days on the market, Call of Duty: Warzone has exceeded 30 million unique players, according to a post on Twitter last Friday. And what do you do when you reach 30 million players in your free-to-play battle royale? Why, you throw a pizza party, of course!

First, a little comparison. Activision's been updating Warzone's total player count over its first week-and-a-half, and while it started out trending higher than the other two big battle royale games -- Fortnite and Apex Legends -- it seems to have flattened slightly. Since nobody provides their updates in exactly the same time frames (grumble, grumble), we're left with the following imperfect comparisons:

Fortnite:
1 day - 1 million players
8 days - 7m
15 days - 10m

Apex Legends:
3 days - 10m
7 days - 25m

Warzone:
1 day - 6m
3 days - 15m
10 days -30m

Fortnite seems slow in comparison to the other two, but I'd argue that's because the battle royale genre was a newer thing back then (even with PUBG) and it was, forging its own path, which enabled later games to pull from that pre-existing audience to boost their early numbers. By comparison, Warzone seems initially stronger than Apex Legends, but has likely slowed to better match its pace after 10 days.

Keep in mind, though, that Warzone had a very large pre-existing install base, in the form of regular Call of Duty players, and you could make the argument that it's brought in fewer totally "new" players than Apex Legends or Fortnite did. It will be interesting to see how the numbers keep rising, and whether Activision will be as generous at giving them out once they level off.

Perhaps in celebration of its most recent milestone, Activision offered free pizza to players last Friday via a special promotion. All you had to do was live in the U.S. and tweet out a certain hashtag combo from 3 to 9 p.m. Maybe it wasn't the coolest online game-plus-pizza promotion ever, but free pizza is free pizza. Now, if they air-dropped it to your home like a battle royale combatant dropping onto the battlefield, that would have been even better. Or wait, no ... that would probably have been the opposite of better.