Whether you liked The Game Awards or not, you had to admit that certain moments stuck out from the rest. And no, we’re not talking about the 30-minute “session” with Hideo Kojima and Geoff Keighley, that happens almost every year. Instead, we’re talking about Kratos voice actor Christopher Judge poking fun at himself for last year’s LONG acceptance speech, only to turn it around and blast another game. Specifically, we’re talking about how he noted that his speech last year at the TGAs was LONGER than the campaign in Call of Duty Modern Warfare III. As you can imagine, the crowd had quite the reaction to that.
He even added in a line saying, “Another company I’ll never work for.” So you can tell that the man was on a mission, and that “mission” got a lot of people talking about whether it was “just a joke” or something more. The people who didn’t like the joke at all were various devs who have worked at Call of Duty.
As you’ll see in the tweet below, Twitter users grabbed snapshots of the Judge moment and how the devs tried to use them to say why their game was better than God of War on PS4/PS5. They specifically noted how their “engagement rate” was MUCH higher than anything the series has pulled off in the past. As Twitter users noted, that’s not only a dumb thing to measure the games by, but you could counter that by noting how the most recent games with Kratos were multi-time award winners, including Game of the Year winners, while their franchise has been just “milking the cow” since the original Modern Warfare trilogy.
And while it’s true that the franchise has better sales than the Santa Monica Studio titles, that’s also not the point.
The campaign for their most recent title was the shortest in the series’ history, and all sorts of information about the rushed development process has come out as well. For example, the team had to make the game in 16 months, which is NOT A LOT OF TIME! Furthermore, the team had to work nights and weekends after being promised they wouldn’t have to do that, and many issues in the game are going on right now that Sledgehammer Games either refuses to address or flat-out denies. They even released a statement saying they were “proud of the game they made,” when that belies the point.
Was it a little tacky for Christopher Judge to make that joke? Maybe. But was it honest? Yep!
