Call of Duty is one of the biggest video game franchises of all time, but find out why one writer thinks it may have done more harm than good for the industry.
Call of Duty is a juggernaut. The series has sold millions of copies, and earned billions of dollars for publisher Activision. It dominates sales charts, usually earns strong review scores, and is consistently the top selling game of the year. Despite its immense success, however, I feel as though Call of Duty has negatively impacted the industry in numerous ways.
Before I continue with the reasons why I think Call of Duty has negatively impacted the gaming industry, I feel as though I should stress something: I consider myself a fan of Call of Duty. I have played every core entry in the series to date, and have enjoyed almost all of them. The studios behind Call of Duty set out to make highly polished first-person shooters, and on that front, they deliver more times than not.
Even so, I think that the negative effects Call of Duty has had on the industry can be seen in a number of different ways. First I would point to its annual release schedule, which I think normalized annual releases for story-driven games. Now, sports titles have been annualized since the 90s, but it wasn't until Call of Duty became such a massive phenomenon that we started to see annual release schedules applied to story-driven franchises as well.
Perhaps the most prominent example of this is Assassin's Creed. As Call of Duty started pumping out games on a yearly basis, we started to see Ubisoft do the same thing with its stealth franchise. Of course, the huge success of Assassin's Creed II also played a role in that decision, but without Call of Duty proving story-driven games could be annualized and still sell quite well, I doubt we would have seen Assassin's Creed go that route.
The Assassin's Creed series has arguably suffered quite a bit from its annual release schedule. What was once a highly-rated series began to see its review scores decline and its sales begin to slow – probably due to franchise fatigue. Furthermore, Ubisoft's rush to maintain its annual release schedule for Assassin's Creed saw the company put out the messy Assassin's Creed Unity, which was clearly not ready for release.
Ubisoft has since learned from its mistakes, and decided to give Assassin's Creed a break in 2016. However, Call of Duty is still going strong with its annual release schedule, having seen a new game in the series every year, without fail, since 2005. Call of Duty has been able to maintain this intense schedule because its stories are secondary to its other features, whereas Assassin's Creed is story first, everything else second. Until Black Ops III, though, Call of Duty sales were declining from one year to the next, which could indicate that franchise fatigue is finally setting in for it just as it did for Assassin's Creed.
Besides Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty's influence has also had a negative impact on a number of other gaming franchises. For example, after the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games blew up in popularity, we saw many other big shooters follow suit in an attempt to capitalize on the craze. EA brought both its Medal of Honor and Battlefield franchises to modern settings, with varying degrees of success. Medal of Honor has been dead since 2012, and Battlefield is already abandoning modern warfare in favor of World War I, after failing to win over a significant number of Call of Duty's players with Battlefield 3 and 4.