Video game industry scoop-master Jason Schreier has another video game industry scoop at Bloomberg: Activision is going to delay next year’s Call Of Duty game, making 2023 the first year without a new Call Of Duty game since 2005. Schreier says this is probably unrelated to Microsoft’s decision to recently swallow up Activision in its hungry maw, with unnamed executives saying that next year’s game is actually being delayed because “a recent entry in the series failed to meet expectations, leading some executives to believe that they’re introducing new versions too rapidly.”
To be clear, this year’s Call Of Duty game—reportedly a sequel to 2019’s reboot of the Modern Warfare sub-series—is still coming out this fall, but the one after that is reportedly being bumped back a year. So we’ll get a new Call Of Duty in 2022, but not in 2023. (That’s assuming Schreier is right, which he usually is.)
Now, Activision choosing not to put out a new Call Of Duty game for the first time in almost two decades may seem like a shock, but it really shouldn’t be to anyone that closely follows this series. As we astutely noted last year with the release of the forgettable Call Of Duty: Vanguard, Activision’s insistence on releasing a Call Of Duty game every year has been killing the series.
With sequels coming out annually, it gave the various development studios that work on Call Of Duty no time to see what worked and what didn’t work about previous entries, forcing the series to play catch-up with itself when it finds something that players like (which is what happened with Modern Warfare and the popular free-to-play Warzone off-shoot mode).
The good news is that 2024’s Call Of Duty will probably be better than they have been over the last few years. Also, if you’re desperate to find something else to fill that COD-shaped hole in your gaming life, there will always be more big, dumb shooter games.