Activision President Rob Kostich has sought to set expectations on where Call of Duty is now.
In an interview with Venturebeat, Kostich was asked about the number of people working on Call of Duty games. Kostich revealed they are now at 3,000 employees, and elaborated further:
“Like I said, these games are quite labor-intensive now. You see everyone doing this, all the big games are – quite big teams are trying to pull these things together.
They’re monumental efforts. Competition is real, and so we’re just focused on, again, just how we can deliver our players’ expectations, and to do so nowadays, it takes a lot more than it used to back in the day.”
So Kostich admits that Activision has had to scale up their franchise to stay competitive at a top level. It would be easy to see that Call of Duty is at a far more advanced level than Battlefield, but Activision is looking beyond that, and sees their competitions as the likes of Fortnite, PUBG, and Destiny 2.
But when pressed on how they have changed the way they make Call of Duty games, Kostich pushes back on that notion. He says:
“I don’t know that the model has changed that much. We still have studios who lead the way.
What I will say is that we have studios helping more now and it takes a lot of work as we think about the seasons and things that we do for any one game.
When we first started Call of Duty, the first game was just a PC game and a lot of that work was contained within a studio. Now, the effort is significant across seasons, the season of content, the free to play aspects of the franchise, but we absolutely still have key leadership on each and every game.
You see in the credits of our game, there’s always going to be a lot of studios because we want to obviously pay respect to everyone who has participated in helping us get there to the finish line.
It just takes more and more people now. That’s probably the reflection you see, but I don’t think our focus has really changed at all over time.”
Kostich’s description of their process is quite interesting. Obviously management has some say on how the Call of Duty franchise is going, as the company wants to get the studios churning out annualized releases. But Kostich claims that, by and large, management lets the studios make the individual games as they want.
That’s Kostich claiming that Call of Duty’s main studios have a lot of creative freedom, not just in terms of creating the narrative, but in terms of scale, DLC plans, etc. It’s an interesting claim as we all know very well by now that Call of Duty Modern Warfare III was originally planned to be Call of Duty Modern Warfare II DLC and spun off into its own game.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare III will be released on November 10, 2023, on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows via Steam and Battlenet.
