Activision Knows The Real Problem With Call Of Duty Is Its...

The tepid response to Black Ops 7 is freaking Activision out. Good.

Last week: Finally played FEAR (2005) and adored its amazing slomo, slick guns, and incredible sound work.

They should stop making Call of Duty every single year.

I realize that's a reheated take from like, 2014, but when is the last time you heard it said out loud? The yearly Call of Duty game is such a calcified constant of our hobby that, at some point, the people who used to say "they should stop making CoD every single year" just sorta gave up and accepted that series is as inevitable as back pain.

We pleaded to Activision to take a break, made our case that the 12-month cycle was unsustainable and diminishing, and Activision responded by doing the exact opposite for going on 20 years.

With the sort of "milk it dry" hubris that defined the Bobby Kotick era of Activision, the megapublisher decided it could outpace CoD burnout—outrun diminishing returns—by tripling down. More studios, more bodies, more CoD. CoD but battle royale. CoD zombies. CoD extraction. CoD on your phone. CoD but battle royale, but on your phone.

In 2025, Activision is essentially an apparatus of the Call of Duty machine—an all-consuming body of studios that once made original works, but have since been conscripted to ensure CoD every 12 months is still possible and profitable. Until recently, you couldn't argue with the results. CoD kept its pace through three hardware generations, evolving and reacting to the times while maintaining a quality floor high enough that you could always make the argument that your $60-$70 of value was there.

But not this year. The people who show up every 12 months are skipping Black Ops 7, and it's freaking Activision out. The game is less than a month old and the corp is already talking about how it'll do better next time—committing this week to stop releasing back-to-back CoDs in the same subseries.

"The reasons are many, but the main one is to ensure we provide an absolutely unique experience each and every year. We will drive innovation that is meaningful, not incremental. While we aren’t sharing those plans today, we look forward to doing so when the time is right," it said.

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Source: PC Gamer