Here's Why 'Call of Duty: Warzone's' Player Count Has Been Reduced

The player count for Call of Duty: Warzone lobbies has been reduced without notice, meaning that the battle royal matches are now smaller than usual.

For context, Warzone typically supports up to 150 competitors per game, although these lobbies do not necessarily have to be filled every time.

There are also occasionally some limited-time modes that increase this capacity to a whopping 200 participants, but even on a regular day there is still a lot of people running around the Caldera map.

By contrast, solo matches in Fortnite are comprised of just 100 players and the recent Battlefield 2042 facilitates up to 128, which some found to be overkill, as it resulted in cluttered maps and hectic firefights.

Meanwhile, a standard game of Apex Legends will involve twenty teams of three, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is also capped at a hundred.

In short, outside of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), you will struggle to find lobbies that are quite as crowded as those in Call of Duty: Warzone.

However, they have recently been whittled down a bit, with matches now supporting 140 players instead of the usual 150. There has been no official update about this on any of the game's social media channels or its blog, but fans have noticed the reduction anyway.

Unlike a lot of other tweaks made to games like Fortnite or Warzone, this was not implemented via an update that players themselves had to download, which indicates that the change must have been made to the servers instead.

We can confirm that the player count has been reduced by looking at the official Call of Duty: Warzone Trello board (which has been a reliable source of information in the past). This forum is used by developers Raven Software to post more granular updates about the game that might not warrant full blog posts.

For example, you can find things like patch notes, announcements about anti-cheat software, responses to FAQs, and news about various bug fixes. To further substantiate things, it was posted by Alexis Barth, who is the community manager for Raven Software.

We can gather additional information from this card, as it also indicates that the change has been rolled out across all platforms—affecting users on Xbox, PlayStation and PC—and that the rationale behind it was to mitigate issues that were causing players to disconnect from matches.

Aside from that, there is not much more we can glean from the Trello card, as its description box has been left blank.

Newsweek has contacted Call of Duty: Warzone's publisher Activision for an update on how exactly the player count reduction will benefit the game's performance and when (and if) it will be restored back to its original capacity of 150. At the time of writing, there has been no response.

In the meantime, fans are not especially pleased about this change, noting that it seems like a step backwards. It's been a pretty rocky week in general for the battle royale genre, as Fortnite experienced significant downtime yesterday (December 29) as well.