Call of Duty: Blackout battle royale free to play for a week as new respawn mode goes live
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's popular battle royale mode Blackout will be free to play for a week, starting later today.
The last-player-standing skirmish, in which up to 100 players drop into the Blackout map to scavenge weapons and take each other out will be available to download as a Free Trial on PS4, Xbox One and PC until 24 January. Publisher Activision is yet to confirm a start time for the free trial, but it is expected to go live around 6pm GMT.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 released to critical acclaim in October this year, with the full £50 package featuring competitive multiplayer and the co-op Zombies mode alongside Blackout.
Activision subsequently released the £35 'Battle' edition which stripped out zombies, while this latest gambit looks to be an attempt to boost the player of Blackout as Call of Duty looks to take on Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.
A report from SuperData said that Fortnite made the "most annual revenue of any game in history" in 2018, with $2.4bn spent on micro-transactions for the free-to-play phenomenon.
Whether Activision has a long-term plan to make their battle royale mode free-to-play permanently remains to be seen, but this trial could be seen as a way of testing the water. Particularly as Activision has recently announced it will no longer be publishing long-running service game Destiny following a mutual split with developer Bungie.
The Black Ops free trial comes as Blackout gets a new limited-time-mode (LTM) that brings respawning to the game for the first time. Down But Not Out is a squads-only mode that allows players to respawn at each 'circle collapse' (where the play area shrinks and shifts) as long as at least one member of their four-player squad is still alive.
Down But Not Out runs from now until 30 January. The new mode should make for frantic final battles, as more survivors scrap in the reduced circle space, while the added chance it gives should make the game slightly more forgiving for newer players. Presumably there will be a lot more of them when the free trial beings later today.
