The next one is a Black Ops game set in the Gulf War and I don’t think it was ever planned for this year. This year was always the MW expansion which got packaged as a full game. Gulf War was always 2024 and I think is probably going to be significantly better than MW3.
After that, we know nothing about what the plans are so all bets are off.
The lineup has been planned until 2027 iirc, if CoD was to stop being annual, it wouldn’t be until next gen in 2028 and I certainly don’t expect them to miss the start of next gen without a new CoD game
I agree that it won’t happen soon but they could always decide to delay one of the 2025-2027 games by a year and that would create the gap. I’m not saying it’s likely, but it’s possible.
Exactly. That’s what I meant. The next one was going to be next year while this year would have been settled with expansion and call it a day. Instead, they decided to have a “full” release. If ABK wasn’t purchased, this kind of ploy could happen again, especially if the sales come out swinging.
Yeah, it’s pretty nuts but it starts to make sense when you factor in the budget.
The average COD for this Gen cost like $300-$400M in production budget and if we add the standard “marketing budget costs 50% of the production budget” rule of thumb, we’re looking at a $150-200M marketing budget and you’ll quickly see why selling 25-28M in a life cycle isn’t enough for them.
And if every game starts to “fail” like that, they will need to do something drastic.
If they can have one sales failure (Vanguard), then a sales banger (MW2), then a failure (MW3), then a banger (Black Ops Gulf War), then perhaps they can weather it and ride it out. Maybe. But those failures will eat into the sales and player sentiment over time.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they made MW3 a full game to get out of the Sony marketing deal. On Microsoft and Activision side it’s best to get that contract over with.
Well legally Xbox wouldn’t have been involved in that decision but I suppose it’s possible from the Acti side. We’ll likely never know.
Is MW3 definitely the end of the deal then? Because if so, Gulf War is about to be HUGE as a Game Pass day one title and with Xbox behind it.
I do wonder perhaps they can add 2 studios working on 2 new COD spin offs giving each studio 5years instead of the 3 perhaps they could also plug in other IPs like HALO, DOOM, WOLFENSTEIN, QUAKE to name a few. There is also nothing wrong in letting competitors like Battlefield have some breather.
I believe MW3 is the last game with the Sony marketing deal. I know legally Microsoft wouldn’t get involved with that, but it was in Activision best interest to get that game out of the way and either renegotiate or make the transition smooth for Microsoft.
Have ABK ever said how much they make from MTX like EA has?
CoD can skip one year, just one, and that will give each release extra time in the oven and a better environment for the studios and devs, and this actually might be needed if they are adding a Switch version for the upcoming releases
Personally, if it was up to me, I would keep COD annual as is through 2027 but in 2028, have a brand new next generation only COD game that’s simply a platform where they just add to it for the duration of the generation. Being next generation only would eliminate being held back by the previous generation’s hardware and if they simply keep all post launch content available and don’t remove anything, you could jump in at any time and play through it all which would be the best decision because not everyone buys or can find a next generation console day one or shortly thereafter.
Barring the 10 year contract specifically stating that you must release a new SKU every year for the entire 10 years, this is what I hope they do and is what they should do in my opinion. They’ll still make a shit ton of money, people will still buy micro-transactions like maps, cosmetics, etc. and with the four main studios on the game, they wouldn’t need to keep all the other studios on COD anymore. Also, if they can acquire Certain Affinity, there’s another great support studio for COD which they’ve worked on repeatedly.
Worse case scenario is that I hope they ramp up the main four studios so that if it does stay annual, it won’t affect or have anything to do with all of the other studios.
There’s no way the production budget is that high
I really doubt that’s what it says. I think it likely says “any CoD you release must be on PlayStation” not that they have to release a game every year on PlayStation.
I doubt it too but who knows. If COD stays annual, besides the money aspect, it could be that’s part of the contract. We won’t know for sure unless the entire contract leaks.
I don’t think either Xbox or PlayStation would sign a deal like that. They wouldn’t want to prohibit a possible change to the schedule in the future. If the series falls of a cliff in terms of quality and sales, they will want the option. A bad CoD that sells poorly is bad for PlayStation too.
This is gunna go wild
Im convinced the media scoring Modern Warfare 3 like they are did not even play the game.
This is one of my favorite campaigns in the series and the campaign feels like they made the awesome spec op missions they used to do into a full fledged campaign and i love it.