The only way Call of Duty ever gets better is if we stop playing it
MORGAN PARK, STAFF WRITER
Last week: Finally played FEAR (2005) and adored its amazing slomo, slick guns, and incredible sound work.
They should stop making Call of Duty every single year.
We pleaded to Activision to take a break, made our case that the 12-month cycle was unsustainable and diminishing, and Activision responded by doing the exact opposite for going on 20 years.
With the sort of “milk it dry” hubris that defined the Bobby Kotick era of Activision, the megapublisher decided it could outpace CoD burnout—outrun diminishing returns—by tripling down. More studios, more bodies, more CoD. CoD but battle royale. CoD zombies. CoD extraction. CoD on your phone. CoD but battle royale, but on your phone.
In 2025, Activision is essentially an apparatus of the Call of Duty machine—an all-consuming body of studios that once made original works, but have since been conscripted to ensure CoD every 12 months is still possible and profitable. Until recently, you couldn’t argue with the results. CoD kept its pace through three hardware generations, evolving and reacting to the times while maintaining a quality floor high enough that you could always make the argument that your $60-$70 of value was there.
But not this year. The people who show up every 12 months are skipping Black Ops 7, and it’s freaking Activision out. The game is less than a month old and the corp is already talking about how it’ll do better next time—committing this week to stop releasing back-to-back CoDs in the same subseries.
“The reasons are many, but the main one is to ensure we provide an absolutely unique experience each and every year. We will drive innovation that is meaningful, not incremental. While we aren’t sharing those plans today, we look forward to doing so when the time is right,” it said.
It’s a statement that should embarrass Activision on a number of levels. For one, the megapublisher that usually only opens its mouth to brag about sales apparently saw BO7 engagement numbers so scary that it saw fit to publicly admit the last few CoDs were totally phoned in (something we already knew, of course).
Remember that this whole “back-to-back” cycle began to reportedly cover up a delay that would’ve forced CoD to finally skip a year—an assessment that Activision denied at the time. Since the suits above would sooner die than let that happen, a rushed Modern Warfare 3 reboot was forcibly shot out of a cannon just a year after Modern Warfare 2. It was the worst CoD in history, and marked the end of Activision bragging about Call of Duty’s sales, pivoting instead to “record-breaking engagement.”
Call of obligation
Those cracks in the machine have only got bigger over three years. Black Ops 6 was fine—fans liked that it wasn’t more Modern Warfare, sprinting in all directions was kinda neat, and it was yet another thing to grind for 100 hours—but BO7 had that same MW3 stink from the start. The same maps, the same guns, and the same zombies with a ’90s aesthetic swapped out for 2035.
It’s a naked ploy for maximum value extraction that only works when people let themselves be suckers.
You can feel that BO7 is just an expensive update to BO6—they’re not even hiding it! They were even planning to port over all the guns and skins like they did in MW3 before the sheer ugliness of CoD’s cosmetic output triggered a revolt.
But the most damning signal that the CoD cycle is truly broken is that the task of making a single Call of Duty has become so monumental and difficult that Activision’s old strategy for reselling the same game every year—having a different studio do it each time in a different time period—doesn’t even work anymore. Infinity Ward is taking four years to do what it used to pull off in less than two. Sledgehammer needed Treyarch to help finish MW3, and Treyarch hasn’t made a Call of Duty without Raven Software as its “co-developer” since 2018.
Activision wants us (and its shareholders) to believe that its only mistake was giving us too much Black Ops or Modern Warfare back-to-back, but we all know the real problem: too much Call of Duty.
CoD could slow down. It should slow down. But before Activision resorts to that, it’s doing everything in its power to convince us that’s not necessary—that it’s still innovating and earning our annual offering of $70.
This time, it didn’t work. Maybe you can chalk that up to renewed competition: Battlefield 6 is demonstrating the benefits of actually taking a break and coming out the other side with a much better game. EA let Battlefield go away long enough for people to miss it, and that longing created the conditions for Battlefield 6 to be the biggest FPS of the year. This is not a new idea, it’s just not how CoD has ever done things.
Activision won’t let CoD go away long enough for anyone to miss it. Instead, it feeds off our constant attention and investment and interaction. It’s a naked ploy for maximum value extraction that only works when people let themselves be suckers.
If, like me, you once loved CoD and wish it were still exciting, you should want that break. And the only way that Activision will ever actually do it is if we speak the only language it listens to: Stop playing.
