Activision Publishing CEO says yearly Call of Duty releases “have found a nice equilibrium with peoples’ appetite”
“Having alternating studios is one of the secrets to the franchise’s success. You have different creative people who are strong-willed and have minds of their own. Everyone gets what makes a great Call of Duty game. Treyarch and IW are the masters, and have built this thing. So, there’s a lot of common DNA from year to year. But then people come in and want to top each other. There’s some healthy competition. There’s a desire within the creative team to not do the same thing and not be stagnant, the same way there is in the player community.”
– Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg
Hirshberg also mentioned how Call of Duty releases have become a sort of “pop culture event” that people want to take part in simply because it’s topical. He compared to to the release of Avatar (2009 movie), saying “a lot of non-hardcore sci-fi fans saw Avatar because it was an event. You felt you had to be a part of it. We’ve reached the status with Call of Duty of this sort of pop-cultural inevitability.”
