At the time of writing, there are rumors circulating that Call of Duty will be skipping a mainline release next year, instead putting out a free-to-play online title for 2023. These rumors arrive against a backdrop of walkouts at Call of Duty: Warzone primary developer Raven Software following ‘good standing’ dismissals of QA team members – i.e. staff were let go without disciplinary precedent. There have also been staff walkouts across Activision from employees demanding CEO Bobby Kotick’s removal after allegations of his misconduct and harassment came to light.
There’s also been a sense that the series is losing its commercial edge over the last few mainline releases. Sales of Vanguard were down by more than a third on 2020’s Black Ops Cold War, and looking back at its scattershot approach in recent years – remasters, battle royales, new settings, revisited ones – it seems to be experimenting with approaches to stay relevant.
It’s obviously a complex situation for anyone working on Call of Duty right now, politically, ethically, and logistically. But if the rumors transpire to have a factual basis, whatever the reasons for it, taking a year out can only benefit Call of Duty. Because it can only benefit any annualized game.
Bring your favorite movie to mind. Explore everything you like about it, intrinsically – the dialogue, the shooting locations, the camerawork – and also extrinsically. The memory you have of watching it for the first time, the occasions you’ve found the perfect context to quote it, putting it on when you were off sick from work and rolling up in a duvet. Now imagine they made a sequel to that movie every subsequent year since release.
Ask yourself: is there enough depth in the premise to sustain that many more movies? Would the things you liked about the first one still be recognizable in the sixteenth? How likely would it be that its creators still felt they had something to say after returning to the same characters and lore year after year?
We know that’s not why we’ve had 18 Call of Duty games in 19 years. It’s not that its creators have been bubbling over with new things to say about war, or new ways to shoot guns, just like we know the same progress in FIFA’s last 25 titles could have been achieved with five releases and some mid-sized patches. We know that major franchises release new games on a yearly basis from a commercial imperative, rather than a creative one.
We buy the new game, but one could hardly condemn us for it. We associate the brand with our first and best memories, and we want more of them. But the best-case scenario in practice is that we become over-familiar with a good thing – NBA 2K’s imperious MyCareer, for example. The worst case is that our expectations get lower and lower each year with every new perennial disappointment, and that our continuing support becomes monetized in increasingly insidious ways – NBA 2K, you and your VC are front and center again.
So purely from a gamer’s perspective, skipping a year makes a positive statement. It suggests the creators are going to do something that couldn’t be achieved during the previous development cadence. (And just to be clear, development on a new Call of Duty doesn’t begin the day after the last one ships. The franchise has the luxury of several studios working on staggered release schedules, each overlapping the other. But they’re still flying by the seat of their pants to create bespoke solo, co-op and multiplayer components comprising a new mainline entry every few years per studio, and you can feel that pressure when you play them.)
As players, we don’t mind in the least if we have an extra year, or even two, before a new entry that moves the chains forward in a tangible and meaningful way that reminds us why we started playing this series in the first place. And after announcing such a bold statement of intent, the studio’s basically forced to demonstrate something innovative. Otherwise, why did they keep everyone waiting longer?
From the developer’s perspective, it makes even more sense to allow extra dev time. The vast majority of annualized franchises – barring honorable niche exceptions like Cyanide’s Pro Cycling Manager – aren’t hand-to-mouth business models. They sell huge numbers every year, and their parent companies could probably operate at a loss for a long time before they actually went under. They don’t depend on annualized release revenue to remain solvent, but rather to keep growing at the rate they’ve promised to shareholders. These are, of course, decisions made well above a creative director’s head when we’re talking about triple-A dev.
Instead, the creative workforce’s concerns are constraints. It’s true that often constraints force a creative’s hand into action and innovation. Musicians impose limitations on themselves – eight tracks, no overdubs, four instruments, three minutes per track – in order to narrow their focus and create a clear framework that their creativity can sit on. The one constraint that no creator enjoys, though, is time.
Woe betide anyone who had to read the magazine features I wrote as a young staff writer on deadline day. The same thing happens when we’re reviewing games in time for an embargo – drop the clever wordplay and the sophisticated comparisons, just get the pros and cons down. And we only have to write about the things. I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to actually make them to a constantly pressing deadline.
Developers have plenty of other constraints, too. Technical constraints that let them know exactly what is and isn’t possible in the game engine, the fidelity level they can hit while still running at 60fps on a closed console ecosystem. Content restraints from platform holders, censor boards and publishers which draw a clear line as to what’s acceptable tonally, visually and in interactions. Budgetary constraints, which see what were once to be full performance capture cutscenes reduced to jabbering heads on motionless bodies, lips not even synced to the voice lines. Former PlayStation executive recently described the current triple-A development model as “just not sustainable”, citing spiraling costs.
In other words, it’s hard enough to make a game like Call of Duty, which over the last 20 years we’ve come to expect will have Hollywood production values and movie stars in its lead roles. Holding its developers to another, albeit self-imposed, constraint by expecting that to happen on a yearly basis is only going to bleed the concept dry.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
