Activision Has Scaled Up To 3,000 Employees For Call Of Duty, But The Business Model Is The Same

gameranx.com:

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