Even Call of Duty Devs Are Worried About Call of Duty Fatigue
For years, we've all been saying that Call of Duty fatigue is a real thing. It turns out, even the people making the damn games are starting to agree with us.
In a moment of refreshing and almost shocking honesty, a senior developer at Treyarch has admitted that yes, they are worried about players getting sick of their flagship franchise. When asked about series fatigue in an interview with CharlieIntel, Treyarch's senior director of production, Yale Miller, didn't pull any punches.
"I think the honest answer is yes, I worry about that," Miller said.
Same Shit, Different Year
The source of this newfound anxiety is a shift in Activision's release strategy. For years, the Call of Duty machine kept itself from getting too stale by rotating between its major sub-brands. You’d get a Modern Warfare, then a Black Ops, then maybe a trip back to World War II. It was a formula designed to mix things up.
But that's all changed. Since 2022, we've had back-to-back Modern Warfare titles, and now we're staring down the barrel of a second consecutive Black Ops game with the upcoming Black Ops 7. It's this "bunching up" of similar themes that has the developers worried.
"We'll see what the franchise does in the future," Miller added. "We're excited about the opportunities it gave us, but we'd all be dead lying if we said we weren't worried about that."
But This Time It's Different... Right?
Of course, Miller believes the Black Ops series has a secret weapon against this fatigue: it isn't tied to a specific time period. To prove his point, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is set to jump forward to 2035, about 40 years after the events of its direct predecessor, Black Ops 6.
The plan, as always, is to keep players hooked with a firehose of live-service content. Miller promised "new gameplay experiences? More content, more maps, weeklies, with functional stuff like deeper weapon prestige experiences." It's the standard live-service promise, but we'll have to see if a time jump and some new prestige levels are enough to keep things fresh.
It's a rare and welcome moment of candor from inside one of the biggest machines in the industry. But does it actually matter? As one player bluntly put it, they "crossed that threshold years ago but it still sales so who cares I guess". As long as the sales charts keep going up, the fatigue is just a feature, not a bug.