Jesus Christ. First Infinity Ward, then Treyarch, then Sledgehammer, now Neversoft. I don't hate Call of Duty, but they should quit making so many. The market is already flooded with military shooters.
That's the case, indeed, but so long as the franchise continues to make money off of the more . . . simple-minded demographics of the game, I think they'll keep bringing them out. Honestly, I wanted them to stop after Black-Ops. The campaign on Modern Warfare III wasn't nearly as good as I had hoped it would be. I think it's high time for the series to begin retiring.
Seriously, Ubisoft have like 5 teams working on one Assassin's Creed game, whilst the COD series has almost 5 different studios working on their own games. And I know which series has evolved over time, tried new and different things, whilst retaining their original idea for the series. Qualit over quantity. MW3 was generally poor, and more of an eye pleaser then an actual substance single player game, and the multiplayer is the same as eve so, yeah. Weirdly I am interested in the choice and consequences in Black Ops 2, it seems like this might be the first time their shooter franchise has tried to change it's gameplay and story in some more diverse way. Basically, I see no reason in this apart from money. Nothing will advance, likely.
If this news is indicating what I think it is, I'll give it another two or three years. To explain, this is exactly what Activision did with Guitar Hero. They had a huge hit with one game, so they started releasing multiple games each year to cash in. They did this by assigning old teams to new Guitar Hero games and building new teams for Guitar Hero. As soon as the market crashed by self-induced market oversaturation, they ceased production of the series and shut down half the teams they assigned to the series. It looks to me like Activision has felt that they've reached the point that they can with "only" one CoD game each year. Sales are appearing to stagnate with Modern Warfare 3 selling approximately the same amount as Black Ops. As Neversoft is Activision's go-to team for shovelware, it seems like they feel multiple games per year to be the next logical step. Remember, Neversoft has worked on a grand total of four franchises.... since 1998 and only two of them were Neversoft's idea in the first place. If Activision thinks that they'll be able to make CoD last another decade under that particular strategy, it shows that they have learned nothing from the trainwreck that was their treatment of Guitar Hero. Of course, this is entirely speculation based on one small part of Neversoft's website. We'll have to wait for an actual announcement to know what's going on with this for sure. Of course, if my speculation is correct, then I have to say that I'm sick and tired of Neversoft being assigned to shovelware. They're actually a pretty good team. Tony Hawk was awesome at its peak (and I'm actually looking forward to Tony Hawk HD), with Guitar Hero, they made a decent rhythm game and actually made efforts to improve as the series went on and with Gun.... well, they showed competence at least and it might have been a much better game if half their team wasn't working on Tony Hawk. I would love to see Neversoft allowed to do their own thing.
Here's where I disagree with you. You can't compare the Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero to the Call of Duty franchise and here's why. The reason why Tony Hawk games started doing so poorly was because they changed the gameplay way too much. If you compare Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 to Tony Hawk's Project 8, there is a MASSIVE change in the gameplay and the design. People loved Tony Hawk games for what they were, and somebody decided to alter it to the point where they stopped being fun. The reason why you can't compare Guitar Hero to Call of Duty is because Guitar Hero is pretty straight forward, and there's nothing you can really do to keep things fresh. I have played many Guitar Hero games, and they're all the same. Just play songs on your toy guitar. No story, no interesting innovations, just the same game every time with new songs. Every single game did this, and people got tired of doing the same thing over and over and over again. The reason why Call of Duty is different is because you can do a lot more to keep things fresh while still keeping the core gameplay. You can play in a new time period, you can add new guns, a new story, and people will keep buying it because while most people don't like playing military shooters, there is a huge group of people that will be satisfied with what Activison has been doing. If you look at the difference between World of War, Modern Warfare, Black Ops and Black Ops II, they're essentially the same type of game. However, each game bring something new to the table. Call of Duty has been found a perfect middle ground between the repitition of Guitar Hero and the drastic changes to Tony Hawk. I wouldn't give it 2 or 3 years. I would give it 10. Yes, ten years of yearly releases before Call of Duty is to the point where it's not a valuable franchise any more.
CoD is going to go on for another 15 years, isn't it? I mean, they've seriously got how many people working on the games now? It's turning into Ultima 9, where it gets made by how many different people. Let's hope it doesn't actually become a second Ultima 9, where there are so many screw-ups that you want to kick the bucket.
This is all well and good, on paper. But if sales are reflecting a decline in interest, as Cloud3514 pointed out, those "new somethings" clearly aren't enough.
That's where he is wrong though, as the series is still selling more with each new installment in the series. I assume Cloud3514 used the sales in my signature, and there's really only one thing I have to say to that: The game will steadily sell for another half year, until Black Ops 2 comes out, by that time it will have another 1-2 million sales added on top of the number in my signature. So they are not declining, which means that his arguement kinda just falls apart. Besides, nobody would complain about a game selling more than 20 million copies. Only Nintendo's top selling games do better than Call of Duty.
