"Well, no offense to Zelda, but [GTA and COD] are the two biggest games of the year." That quote, from Activision chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl, landed this week like a grenade rolled into a Nintendo fan convention.
Bahl made the comments in an interview with an industry publication, where he argued that Grand Theft Auto 6 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 would dominate the November release window. The context matters here: most publishers have already cleared out of that window specifically to avoid competing with Rockstar's long-awaited open world game. Nintendo, pointedly, did not. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time hits Switch 2 on November 5, two weeks ahead of GTA 6's launch.
What Bahl actually said, and why it's raising eyebrows
Bahl's full argument was more nuanced than the headline suggests. His core claim is that GTA 6 will bring lapsed players back to their PS5s and Xbox Series consoles, and those same players will then pick up Modern Warfare 4. "More people coming in to the dashboards, more people taking the dust off their Xbox or PlayStation and playing again, is going to be more eyeballs for us overall," he said.
Here's the thing: that logic holds up reasonably well for GTA 6. Rockstar's game has been in development for over a decade, carries a reported budget north of $1 billion, and has generated the kind of cultural saturation that got a Saturday Night Live weekend update skit dedicated to it. GTA 6 will almost certainly be the single biggest launch in gaming history by raw sales volume.
The COD part is where the argument gets shaky. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 hit a 17-year sales low last year, and the franchise has been bleeding goodwill for several annual cycles. Bahl slotting Modern Warfare 4 alongside GTA 6 as a co-equal "biggest game of the year" is the kind of claim that a marketing executive makes, not a neutral observer.
The multiplatform argument vs. the cultural argument
Bahl's strongest card is platform reach. GTA 6 launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Modern Warfare 4 goes even wider, including Switch 2. The Ocarina of Time remake is Switch 2 exclusive. Raw install base math does favor the multiplatform titles when counting potential buyers.
But "biggest" isn't a pure sales metric in how most players use the word. Ocarina of Time is the kind of release that crosses generations, moves hardware, and generates genuine emotional investment from people who haven't touched a game in years. The original 1998 release still sits at the top of Metacritic's all-time chart. A full remake of that game is not a minor event, regardless of how many platforms it's on.
What most players miss in this debate is that the audiences barely overlap. Someone dusting off their PS5 for GTA 6 is not the same person who pre-ordered a Switch 2 bundle for Ocarina of Time. These aren't competing for the same wallet in most cases. Bahl's framing treats gaming like a zero-sum attention market when the reality is messier.
COD's declining cultural weight makes this harder to defend
The key here is that Bahl's argument would have landed differently five years ago. At its peak around Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops 2, Call of Duty genuinely was a cultural phenomenon that transcended gaming. That era is over. The franchise still sells in volume, but the conversation around each new entry has shrunk considerably. Anecdotally, pre-order numbers at retail stores this cycle reportedly show GTA 6 and Zelda generating far more activity than Modern Warfare 4.
Bahl also made a secondary claim that COD's defining quality is the social experience of playing with friends, not the gunplay itself. That might be true internally, but it's not a differentiator. Dozens of multiplayer games offer the same thing, several of them free to play.
The most telling detail in the whole interview is that Bahl felt the need to mention Zelda at all. If Modern Warfare 4 was genuinely one of the two biggest games of the year, the Ocarina of Time remake wouldn't even register as a comparison point worth addressing.
For everything confirmed about Rockstar's upcoming open world game, check out the GTA 6 pre-order guide covering dates, platforms, and editions. November is going to be a packed month regardless of which side of this argument you land on.
