How Call of Duty is dying from the inside

I must admit before I write this that I am not a gamer. I don’t think I’ve ever played Call of Duty but this blog post is written from the point of view of a developer. I am told by my (expert) friends that CoD: Modern Warfare 3 is released today. It is the successor to Modern Warfare 2 which is an off-cut of the main Call of Duty series which is set in modern day rather than historical wars – with new fictional wars instead. It is expected to sell quite well. It is made by a company called Infinity Ward. And that is all that I understand so please understand if I make mistakes.

The problem is that developers are leaving Infinity Ward. Last year the founders (and creators of Call of Duty) Jason West and Vincent Zampella were sacked by Activision (the managing company?) due to misconduct as they were rumored to have been selling ideas to Electronic Arts. Then they all did a suing game with each other and Zampella and West decided the best thing to do was to and make a new company called Respawn Entertainment (which doesn’t have as great a name as Infinity Ward). Around forty employees of Infinity Ward have since left the company to go and work for Respawn which is planning on announcing its first title soon.

Many programmers are also planning on leaving Activision and Infinity Ward to go and work for Respawn instead. The lack of creative design inside Infinity Ward has been gradually killing it and games released since West and Zampella left have not been as popular with the dedicated community. Perhaps this is a sign that the franchise is dying, perhaps it is a sign Respawn will release something even better.

If you are one of my friends in real life and you plan on uploading an unboxing video to YouTube I will not be talking to you for the next week and I will also unsubscribe (there are currently 8000+ videos like this).