Why Call of Duty has lasted 20 years without triggering franchise exhaustion | Rob Kostich
After 20 years, Call of Duty has hit more milestones than most other video games. As of last year, Activision’s first-person shooter combat franchise had hit $30 billion in lifetime revenue and 425 million premium copies sold to date.
The game debuted in 2003 as a rival to Medal of Honor, and it has outlasted that franchise. It reinvented itself with the launch of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and did so again in 2019 with Call of Duty: Mobile and in 2020 with Call of Duty: Warzone.
Call of Duty: Mobile reached over 650 million people, and Warzone topped 125 million downloads in its first year. And now there are more than 3,000 developers working on the Call of Duty franchise. It’s easy to find people who say they are tired of the franchise, but somehow they keep on buying the games.
More than those numbers, Call of Duty has given a lot of us a common gaming culture. We know what it means to frag an enemy, the joy of taking out a camper, and the companionship of talking with Warzone teammates late at night in the midst of a battle royale match. I enjoy the moment of getting in a last shot that carries the team to victory. OK, well, may that doesn’t happen as often as I’d like it to happen.
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What is surprising about Call of Duty is its resilience. Activision tripled down on its investment by getting three studios to work on games at once so it could deliver a Call of Duty game every single year. Then it put tons of developers on it at once to take the premium franchise to free to play with both the mobile version and
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