Every year since Rockstar released a Grand Theft Auto game, Call of Duty‘s annual release has been the best-selling game of the year, and there was no reason to believe that this year would be any different. Nonetheless, something about Call of Duty Vanguard’s release feels out of the ordinary. There’s no buzz, no conversation, and yet there are signs of success elsewhere. So, what exactly is going on here?

First and foremost, there’s what we don’t know, which is any Activision Blizzard sales figures. It used to be customary for Activision to brag about massive first-day or weekend Call of Duty sales, but we haven’t heard anything as of yet, five days before the game’s release on November 5. The series is no longer breaking its own records year after year like it used to, but we have no idea when we’ll find out how well it’s selling.

We can follow the game on Twitch, where it’s frequently done well, being a top-streamed game with hundreds of thousands of viewers during peak hours. It can, however, fall quickly. Vanguard is currently trailing League of Legends, GTA 5, CSGO, Valorant, Apex Legends, DOTA 2, Rainbow Six Siege, and even the Lost Ark beta in its first week. It does, however, rise and fall.

Another approach is to gauge “interest” in the game. We can compare trends based on search volume. I stacked up some of the biggest releases over the next month here, and we can see that Vanguard did indeed spike at launch, though at roughly the same rate as Forza Horizon 5 did when it first went into early access.

That’s a game that’ll only be available on Xbox and PC, not PlayStation, whereas Vanguard will be available across the entire PlayStation install base. That’s a little strange.

The game received a 78 on Metacritic, which isn’t great, but it’s also not out of the ordinary for Call of Duty these days. When the beloved, smash hit Modern Warfare sequel was released in 2019, it only received an 80-81. Last year’s Black Ops Cold War received a score of 76, which was lower than this year’s.

In general, there appears to be a lot of praise for the game in the Call of Duty creator space, both in terms of its campaign and multiplayer, indicating that it may have more legs than players give credit for, at least among its more dedicated players and users, which is a good sign.

On the technical side, it appears that finding games for Modern Warfare and Warzone is now taking longer, indicating that many players are leaving for Vanguard, which did not happen when Cold War was released.

In short, the signals are mixed, but we’re a long way from Activision yelling from the rooftops about raking in hundreds of millions of dollars after just 24 hours. And we’re still in an era where Call of Duty will almost certainly outsell everything else, even if it has a “off year.” That isn’t going to change. Because of Xbox Game Pass, potential competitors this year like Forza and Halo will not be able to surpass actual Vanguard sales, no matter how well they perform.

To summarize, we’ll wait to hear from Activision. In general, the game is getting better reviews than Black Ops Cold War, but it does not appear to be igniting a firestorm in the gaming industry, with other, much more buzzed-about titles dominating the conversation.