The next four Call Of Duty games have already been planned out by Activision

Activision has already planned out the next four Call Of Duty games, all the way to 2027, and there’s an awful lot of people making them.

There’re a lot of long-running concerns about the health of the video games industry that are coming to a head at the moment.

Not only is there an unexplained spate of staff cuts going on but it’s beginning to seem like the bubble has burst on live service games, as questions are also asked over the value for money that AAA games are expected to offer.

The underlying problem is that every generation AAA games become more expensive to make, requiring more people to work on them for longer than ever. And to illustrate that point consider the fact that Activision currently has 3,000 people working on the Call Of Duty franchise.

That figure is across at least 10 studios and includes Call Of Duty: Warzone but possibly not Call Of Duty Mobile, as that’s made by a subsidiary of Chinese giant Tencent Games.

The huge workforce is in part because Call Of Duty is the only major non-sports franchise that still has yearly sequels, with Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games taking it in turns to make games over a period of three years.

Managing all that sounds like a nightmare and yet according to Activision president Rob Kostich, talking to GamesBeat, they have a plan for the next four games, up to 2027.

‘We’re constantly in our planning phase, our long-term planning phase. Right now, we have games planned out all the way through ’27 for the things that we’re working on,’ said Kostich.

Naturally, he didn’t say what any of them are and while rumours suggest that next year’s game is a Black Ops title by Treyarch.

The 2025 title is rumoured to be a return to the Advanced Warfare sub-series by Sledgehammer, but it’s unknown what Infinity Ward will make next, as Modern Warfare 3 supposedly started life as paid-for DLC and it’s not clear if it counts as the actual end of the rebooted Modern Warfare trilogy or not.

Whatever is planned it seems likely that most of the four games will be set in the modern day, or at least close to it.

‘I think we’ve done a lot of games in the future. We probably went as far there as we possibly could. ‘We made some of the games in the past. You start to see the sweet spot over time and what really resonates with the community,’ says Kostich.

‘You see things like the Modern Warfare and Black Ops franchises are really popular. We’ve certainly had some other games that have done really well, like the original World War 2 game from Sledgehammer in 2017 did really, really well as well.

‘It’s a balance, I think most importantly, that we feel like we actually need to provide good differentiated experiences, good things for people to get in, and feel like they’re experiencing new kinds of fun.’

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