Quality is more important than constant content drops
Call of Duty remains one of the biggest franchises in the video game world, a series of first-person shooters that lands every year in November and attracts both dedicated fans and new players. It generates massive sales for parent company Activision Blizzard.
And it creates a lot of discourse in the gaming space. One o the main topics is whether a new game needs to arrive every year or if this hurts both the quality of the product and the health of the overall industry.
Modern Warfare II (written using a 2, which is technically the name of a 2009 release in the same series) is performing better than its predecessors. It is also getting better feedback from the community than Vanguard and Black Ops Cold War.
It is no coincidence that Modern Warfare 2 of 2022 is the sequel to the reboot of Modern Warfare, delivered in 2019. Both are mainly the work of Infinity Ward, although a ton of other studios inside the Activision Blizzard family have contributed to it.
The Ubisoft made Assassin’s Creed series has had a similar trajectory. The company churned out sequels as quickly as it could before fans abandoned the franchise. It then made the strategic decision to pause it for a while and gave developers time. The semi-reboot Origins was then welcomed by the community but Ubisoft did not learn its lesson and the most recent release, Valhalla, has not performed as well as expected.
The big question is: are differences in sales and quality a matter of who makes a Call of Duty or are they an unavoidable element of its early launch schedule? Does the yearly pace affect other franchises, positively or negatively? And are developers and fandoms better served by moving away from it, offering studios more time with less pressure?
For a massive franchise, including the biggest releases from Microsoft, Activision, Sony, Electronic Arts, or their equals, I think the answer is clear: Give development teams all the time they need and do not allow marketing to set the pace of launches. Give them the resources and try to stay out of their way.
This can only work as long as publishers are ready to make a few other changes to how they present and launch video games.
