With Infinity Ward defections continuing and 38 employees suing the pants off Activision, the future of the Modern Warfare developer remains shaky for now. One analyst believes that Infinity Ward will be "essentially closed" after the next map pack gets released. With that in mind, Activision is going to want to prove to the world that its Call of Duty franchise, which has generated over $3 billion in the last seven years, is still going strong. The publisher hopes to do that when it unveils Call of Duty Vietnam on Friday's GameTrailers TV episode.
“Tomorrow you will see a teaser for this year’s Call of Duty game,” Thomas Tippl, chief operating officer of Activision Publishing, told VentureBeat. “Treyarch is working on it and taking the Call of Duty franchise to the next level.”
Although that's a statement that could easily be taken for standard executive hyperbole about a game franchise, it's also a huge challenge to the folks at Treyarch who've basically played second fiddle to Infinity Ward's games in the series. How will Treyarch take the franchise to the "next level" when Modern Warfare 2 already broke all entertainment records? Furthermore, as VentureBeat points out, Vietnam as a setting has not yet produced any blockbuster shooter games. It's going to be interesting to see how this game pans out.
1 Comments
April 29, 2010
By "taking it to the next level" he means that "Treyarch is now our number one COD developer and I really hope this next game sells well".