Activision might be skipping this year's Call of Duty release. Rumors say that we will see the 2023 Call of Duty delayed to 2024.
Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports that Activision has decided for the 2023 Call of Duty delayed to 2024. This makes the year 2023 the first year since 2004 without a mainline Call of Duty release.
Thanks to the middling reception to and failed sales expectations from Call of Duty Vanguard, Activision has made the rather difficult decision to not reap players' cash for one year. Instead, Activision Blizzard will bridge the gap with other projects – not necessarily with new games. This year's Call of Duty title is reportedly set to constant updates and additional content throughout its life cycle, and there will be a new, free-to-play online title coming next year. Treyarch, the studio responsible for the 2023 Call of Duty game, will be helping out on this free-to-play title. The decision to move the release of the game will help ease up the pressure from the studio.
While the timing seems aligned with when Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard gets finalized, people familiar with the issue claim that this decision has nothing to do with it.
It's great to see big studios finally learning from their mistakes. It took Activision Blizzard a good two decades to learn this, but a move this big will have a huge impact on the rest of the industry. They are taking a page out of Take-Two Interactive's WWE 2K, which didn't release a new title in 2020 and 2021. This allowed Visual Concepts, the developers handling WWE 2K, to focus on improvements, and things are looking good for their next release, WWE 2K22. As this year's Modern Warfare sequel is already set in place, the delay has been meted on next year's title instead. Hence, we will still see a new Call of Duty game this year, set in the Modern Warfare timeline, but no new Call of Duty next year.
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