How does Xbox shutdown the Call of Duty factory?

This is just a portion of the list of developers working on Modern Warfare 2.

We can imagine the list is very similar for Treyarch’s 2023 Call of Duty.

By 2023 Microsoft will be able to finally have a say in what studios can do and allow them the freedom to break free of the CoD pipeline.

The question is how? Call of Duty is a logistical nightmare of long tail end support, Warzone 2 content and more.

By 2023, Sledgehammer will all ready be working on CoD 2024.

Divorcing these studios from CoD, even switch to every other year or every 3 years is still a massive logistical hurdle.

How does Xbox shutdown the Call of Duty factory so we can get our damn Crash, Hexen, and Tony Hawk games?

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What do you propose makes this situation a logistical nightmare?

NITPICK: They’re not going to shut it down. Shutting it down means no more COD ever.

They’re going to right-size it with more realistic timelines for a smaller amount of developers.

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I think eventually giving all these teams an extra year in between releases helps give more life to a CoD’s traditional life span while allowing all of them to work on different stuff.

You dont take an IP that takes 10 studios to work at this moment and just “shut it down” or reduce it to 1 like Hindle keeps suggesting. Its idiotic and bad for business.

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It’s an incredibly difficult situation and it requires a lot of planning. It also hinges on Warzone 2 being it’s own thing with own battle pass, operators, guns and maps. I’m assuming it’s under Infinity Ward’s MW2 and will launch in early 2023. A great “reset point” is when the cycle ends so take a break in 2025. Let Sledgehammer’s game and Warzone 2 get a couple more years of content.(This should have happened with MW19) You could slowly staff up the main studios and let the support studios experiment with other things. Ideally it should go back to Infinity Ward, Treyarch and Sledgehammer on main games and Raven on Warzone. Though I could totally see Toys for Bob easily peeling off of Raven and back to doing its own thing in 2024.

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Biannual releases would drastically help that. Keeping Treyarch, Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer on it, but releasing every 2 years gives them 6 years of dev time.

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We can safely expect the franchise to get 1 to 2 years for more dev time, this is the starting point for every change these studios are going to see, they need more time to rearrange.

Secondly, I believe one of the 3 studios will support Warzone mainly, freeing Raven, I believe MS wants a many studios as possible creating new things rather than just wasting away on CoD.

Obviously key thing here is time, all of this will take the whole gen to run smoothly.

The prioritizing of shutting down the CoD cycle is something only us hyper-enthusiasts are doing; most Chad gamers would be pissed if they didn’t have a new CoD every year.

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Can’t find the gif but…

Insert Phil slamming door open gif and then saying…

"Aight bitches, I’m shutting this factory down. "

And then he’ll listen to what everyone would like to work on instead. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Let them, they’ll come back running once a new shinning CoD is available and beyond that it becomes an even greater game due to more dev time.

Surely not that hard. I have confidence that the multi trillion dollar company can sort it out.

I got you Prog

  1. Take off the Devs who are just Battlepass, warzone skin devs. You’re probably not getting much value from them anyways besides extra bodies. Toys for Bob, High Moon, Beenox, Radical

  2. Someone’s has to make COD, so you figure out which of the main COD devs still wants to. My money is on IW, and Treyarch. Sledgehammer is big enough that they can become a COD support studio while also working on other things. And get rid of the annualized cycle, every other year or three years.

  3. Raven is the primary Warzone developers. But what you can do is form a new team under Austin TX or somewhere which FPS talent and make them the warzone team. While the Wisconsin team does new projects.

BOOM problem solved

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  1. They decide to increase staff as they did with the rest of the XGS and Bethesda, like they had more than 400 positions open for the latter half of the last year in order to erase the need of more studios on it.

  2. Cadence of every two or three years. Technically if they still keep the three studio flow each one could have 6 to 9 years of development and that means they could have two projects worked out, one geting at their mid cooldown and then the COD game.

  3. They would use the new timing to have one 9-10/10 COD that sells for two or three games, long legs like GTA V.

  4. Don’t discard the possibility where one of the XGS and Bethesda studios do a COD for fun, like 343i, Coalition and MachineGames.

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Hire more staff, lengthen development time and long tail releases are points often brought up but I think you hit the bullseye when you suggest new teams be tasked with creating new call of duty games. This is absolutely the way forward. Like n0tjack said “Chad gamers would be pissed if they didn’t have a new CoD every year.” I would add to this that casuals also don’t really care who makes the game either. Xbox even has time right now to make this possible. The road map calls for 3 releases through the end of 2023. The 2024 release should be a Xbox funded new call of duty ip. This gives Activision cod support studios a chance to begin work on tony hawk and crash. I think freeing Activision developers from cod burnout should be a priority but the idea that cod needs to be shelved is based on the false idea that casuals even care which developers make games… they don’t care or pay attention to that stuff.

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The answer is obvious…COD has to go on hiatus for at least a year…2024 should not have a COD and that extra time needs to go revitalizing COD

This may come as a surprise to people but there was a time when COD was actually a well respected franchise especially with Black Ops 1 and 2…Yeah Advanced Warfare and Modern Warfare 2019 were both :fire::fire: but aside that the series has taken a massive dip in quality

If COD is going to be a flagship title for Xbox going forward it needs to be a quality franchise again…I’m talking at least 80+ Metacritic…no more living off name recognition and expecting people to buy it regardless of how poor the game is.

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2024 is the year CoD is free from the PlayStation contract. A Call of Duty game needs to release in 2024 or it will be a missed opportunity considering how long PlayStation has had the marketing rights.

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The existing farm will be going until the deal closes, so a 2024 CoD would already likely be set in stone regardless of what Xbox does.

From what’s been reported Playstation is entitled to 3 more titles but one of them would be a Warzone 2/reboot

Also let’s not forget that after it’s unexpected delay several Xbox studios and outside contractors were brought on to help fix Halo Infinite. That game was the best game of the year in my opinion so I have faith Xbox could meet the moment for a big 2024 Xbox Call of Duty. It has to happen, shelving call of duty after you finally wrestled it away from PlayStation is madness.