A 14 year veteran of Raven Software, the developer owned by Activision, has decided to part ways and leave his position as senior executive producer. Ryan Burnett recently announced that April 9 was to be his last day at the company he joined over a decade ago.
Raven Software is an American video game developer based in Wisconsin and founded back in 1990. After its acquisition in 1997 by Activision, the developer eventually switched its focus from first person shooters such as Heretic and Hexen to assisting with the development of titles in the Call of Duty franchise.
Burnett had been in his senior executive producer position for just about the last two years and, according to his LinkedIn page, he had a hand in helping with nearly a dozen Call of Duty titles. Because of the length of his tenure he lists a variety of games as projects he worked on including Call of Duty: WWII, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, as well as Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. The position Burnett leaves is the culmination of a 14 year career which saw the executive producer start out as a tech programmer in 2007 and work his way up the producer hierarchy. Burnett doesn't specify if this move is due to another opportunity and doesn't note anything that prompted the change.
Raven Software has undergone significant changes since its acquisition by Activision but has been relatively stable since its last series of layoffs back in 2010. Losing a long-standing employee such as Ryan Burnett might come as a surprise but will likely not affect any major development in the near future. The developer's most recent collaboration was Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War with developer Treyarch.
Though this announcement is a bit of a shock, it seems likely that the change is just a singular moment rather than a piece of a larger issue. At times in the past, Raven Software had to go through painful layoffs and even had a number of developers leave to create a rival studio, the now-defunct Human Head Studios. This news, however, seems more like a case of a single employee making a change in their life rather than the result of any issue within Raven Software.
Raven Software's stability since its move to focus on the development of the Call of Duty franchise should be reason enough for players to assume all is well despite Burnett's departure. Both Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War are likely to continue to operate as before the move.