How does Xbox shutdown the Call of Duty factory?

If it were me i’d pull traditional multiplayer out alongside Warzone. The entire Multiplayer package would get a Battle Passto sustain it. Single player would become a once every 3-4 year affair with a major update to multiplayer for graphics etc at the same time.

A studio would work on single player and another studio or two on multiplayer. The time saving would come from doing 1/4 the single player releases and not having to re-release multiplayer yearly. If they need to hire some more devs in those teams instead of canibalizing other studios.

Let other studios work on what they want. MS won’t have any problem coming up with “enough” shooters per year. Especially on the multiplayer front. With Halo, COD, Doom, Wolfenstein etc they shouldn’t have any trouble releasing at least a shooter per year.

The problem with long tail games is that if you’re not actively committed to addressing tech debt with massive resources then the game just gets more and more brittle.

Case in point: current Warzone.

They just don’t… I want yearly games… Specially like COD with 4-6 hours of campaign

Post COD being exclusive, the development will become easier

No PS SKU development required, hence more time to develop xbox and PC version with in same time frame

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Is COD really that short? I dont think I’ve played one since Modern Warfare haha.

They increase the size of the main studios like IW and Trey which should free up the other studios to work on their own games, meaning Toys for Bob can start their Banjo game.

Spyro and Crash >>> Banjo

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Yup…

Call of Duty Vanguard campaign length and how long to beat | GamesRadar+.

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yep… i’d kill for a Doom Eternal-length campaign.

or, because I wanna stir the pot a bit, a Halo Infinite-style open world. Infinite Warfare had these side missions you could do that (even though it was basically just “go kill this one ship and kill its captain”) that were a nice side activity to do when you didn’t want to go through a full campaign mission

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From that article:

Call of Duty Vanguard’s campaign length will vary depending on your own personal skill and the difficulty at which you play it, but we’ll plant our flag and say it’s roughly 5-7 hours for the vast majority of people to make it from the new game prompt to seeing the credits roll. This is a fairly standard campaign length for a modern Call of Duty game…

Like @pg2g, I haven’t played a CoD since the first Modern Warfare, so I had no idea what the campaign length might be like. But 5-7 hours sounds pretty perfect to me. When it comes to relatively shallow games like that (no offense to anyone who loves them) I don’t really feel the need for a longer campaign than that.

And once all the CoDs hit Game Pass, I’m quite looking forward to treating them like palate cleansers in between longer games. Currently I tend to use smaller indies for that purpose, and I don’t see stopping that, but once in a while it’ll be nice to engage with some military porn.

And with the vast CoD library it should last me a while. I imagine there must be a dozen games or more since 2007’s Modern Warfare.

CoD is by much more of a priority than Crash, etc and rightfully so - it’s a top 5 game all year every year. It will be far more important than any ActiBliz game. Would be nice if those companies got a special support studio so some of the others can detach from it.

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If I’m not mistaken, the CoD releases are on a 3 year cycle between IW, Trey and Sledge. So they can just skip a year, and that 3 year cycle turns into a 4 year cycle. They can use the extra year for development and to hire some more people. Plus they can just contract some external devs if they are still crunching. I honestly don’t think they need to do anything drastic to free up some of the core studios from Activision.

Transition the franchise to a service, with one primary dev in charge. This way MS contain all 30m people who play, instead of dividing them up with each annual game.

Warzone and this service closely fused together

the thing is, they are only “shallow games” mostly due to Activision and their need to pump out titles on a yearly basis. I’m not saying we need something 30-40 hours long, but I think giving a studio 4-5 years or (or longer if we are still going to split them between IW and Treyarch) to make a COD and include a longer campaign would bring the series back to its heyday when it was known for innovative, hard-hitting campaigns.33333

You don’t pay that much to buy COD to shut it down.

You don’t strike gold with a franchise as big as COD to voluntarily cut it down.

Microsoft will want COD to continue as big as it is, or if possible, make it even bigger.

They’ll most likely leverage the IP as soon as the deal closes (mid 2023) by adding older titles to GP, and 6 months after (if they decided to honor rumored contracts) new titles will come into play.

Studios have already started production of titles years away, they’ll not cancel them.

What will probably happen is that there’ll be more flexibility and less crunch, but the COD machine will not be neglected.

If some developers want to work on something else they may get a better chance now, they might get bigger to handle more projects, or someone will take their place to keep the machine running.

What might change COD more dramatically is if Xbox decided to make future COD games exclusive. Then COD formula might change and take advantage of the opportunities Game Pass provides.

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How were they doing it leading up to COD4 and WAW? To me, that’s the “golden age” of COD. The games were great and long legged and at the time didn’t feel like they came out all the time but I’m sure they were annual. At least the quality was high.

They won’t shutdown anything, they will simply get Activision out of the non sustainable trap they put themselves in. XD

One simple move is removing one SKU from the equation, another one is shifting to 2 years releases. Problem solved.

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I doubt MS is going to make changes to the people developing CoD. Too much money. Not only that downsizing and changing it to a longer dev cycle, while fans may want that, doesn’t gaurentee a good CoD game.

MS might get a CoD game that took three years to develop and flops harming the franchise because the next entry will be three years away.

You know Sony will be building there own shooter at this time. So it’s probably best not to mess with anything unless you want SOCOM to take off during that time.

Its that simple. None of this 1 dev nonsense.

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Who is gonna make SOCOM? Is it gonna be good?

Its been over 15 years of unchallenged dominance by CoD and nothing will change that.

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Note that “just hire more” was what acti was already doing, but competition for staff is very high. We shall see if all the branches manage to hire enough to let some of the other studios out for some fresh air.

As per my research recently:

  • Infinity Ward: 128 open

  • Sledgehammer: 98 open

  • Treyarch: 21

  • Raven: 44

  • High Moon: 18

  • Beenox: 22

  • Toys for Bob: 13

  • Demonware: 59

That’s a lot of jobs! Infinity Ward is hiring more than Playground Games is, more than any Xbox / Bethesda studio.

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