Call Of Duty should take a break for the sake of gamers and developers

A reader is upset that Activision is still not making anything other than Call Of Duty games and suggests it stops the yearly sequels.

Are you a fan of video games? Do you yearn for a new one to play? More specifically, a first person shooter? Well, I have some good news for you. Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 is coming later this year for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows – as well as previous generation consoles. It’s the next chapter for the Call Of Duty series, since its inception in 2003, and with 425 million copies sold, it’s one of the most popular and successful franchises of all time, standing alongside Mario and Pokémon. And for this reader, it needs to go on hiatus. Preferably for a few years, instead of one.

Call Of Duty is one of the few franchises which continues to release a new major instalment on a yearly basis. When you think of video game series which see annual releases, what comes to mind? F1? FIFA? NBA 2K? If so, do you spot a recurring theme? Yes, they’re all related to sports. Annual releases for sports games are nothing new. It’s been happening for years now and most likely will continue, as a result of exclusive contracts which mandate studios such as EA and Take-Two to deliver a yearly release.

But it does raise an interesting question. Why can’t these developers just release one game and build upon it with yearly DLC packs to reflect the start of a new sport season? Not only would it prompt more players to buy the game it would also allow them to replay past seasons and experience a wider range of options and possibilities than simply releasing one game every 12 months and restricting players to just a single season and story, with the overall experience tweaked and polished over last year’s outing in a feeble attempt to justify their hefty price tag.

That said, most of these series are handled by just one or two studios; for example, F1 video games are currently developed solely by Codemasters. Activision (the publisher and owner of Call Of Duty) has taken a different approach to their annual releases. They don’t rely on just one developer to keep the series going.

In recent years, they’ve started assigning more and more of their internal studios to help assist development on the franchise and make sure the next instalment is shipped for Christmas, to the point where last year’s release, a reboot of Modern Warfare 3, was developed by a total of 11 studios: Sledgehammer Games, Infinity Ward, and Treyarch (the three main developers for the series) as well as Raven Software, High Moon Studios, Beenox, Activision Shanghai, Activision Central Tech, Demonware, and Toys For Bob, which recently became independent.

All of those studios, upon Modern Warfare 3’s release, were under the Activision umbrella. And did it deliver promising results? Far from it. The game was panned for being too short, too broken, and underwhelming in terms of story, design, and enjoyment. So why did Activision decide to release this game if it wasn’t finished properly? The answer lies in Modern Warfare 3’s development.

Sledgehammer Games was originally assigned to work on DLC for Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 reboot, which released in October 2022. This would be released the following year, giving Infinity Ward more time to work on their next Call Of Duty game. Fair enough. But several months later, Sledgehammer was then told they needed to make a sequel to Modern Warfare 2. A full-on sequel. And it needed to be done in 16 months.

That’s half the time a Call Of Duty game typically takes to be made. This practice, when it comes to releasing annual instalments, is frankly disgusting and it needs to stop. Not only is Activision denying its studios the chance to work on fresh new ideas or bring back old IPs, they’re enforcing a potential crunch culture on the people helping to complete the game. And that is not what we need from the video game industry, least of all right now when more and more workers are being laid off.

When Microsoft purchased Activision and its sister company Blizzard last October, several discussions were being made about bringing back dormant series such as Raven Software’s Hexen. Since then, nothing has come to fruition. The fact that the only two games Activision will release this year are part of the Call Of Duty series suggests that it will be business as usual.

Players are not stupid. Since the loot box scandal of 2017 and the growing controversy surrounding monetisation in games, the quality of video games has come under increasingly levels of scrutiny. Call of Duty may have been able to justify its yearly releases when it only had a few studios working full-time on it.

But like F1, FIFA, and every other sports game series, the time for Activision to give Call Of Duty a break is now. Because if this shambolic process of mandating its studios to carry on as they have done for years is to continue the fallout will not be pretty. Microsoft has shown its willingness to close developers even if they are making quality games, as they did with Tango Gameworks. What is there to stop them doing it again?

By reader George White