Surprising absolutely no one , Activision Blizzard has confirmed that a new Call of Duty game is in preparation to be released in 2020; However, curiously, the company has yet to confirm which team developed the title. For eight years, Activision Blizzard has maintained a strict model when it comes to Call of Duty's development cycle. That's why, in its February 2019 Activision quarterly call, the publisher speculated that something unexpected might be afoot this time around, when the publisher remained timid about which of its developers is working on a Call of Duty game scheduled for 2020.
To delve into what 2020 may have in the works for Call of Duty, we'll need to look back a few years into Call of Duty history and examine how Activision has traditionally unearthed for the franchise.
Activision has managed to get a new Call of Duty game every year since 2005's Call of Duty 2 (but when you count 2004's Call of Duty you can technically argue that there's a new game out from the start every year. : Finest Hour , the console version of the original 2003 PC game). There are currently four Activision studios associated with Call of Duty development - Infinity Ward , Treyarch , Raven Software and Sledgehammer Games . The first two are mainstays, the last two were originally used as support studios. Activision has made the developer (Sledgehammer) the main studio behind Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty: WWII .
The firm was initially torn between Activision, Infinity Ward and Treyarch and had two full Call of Duty titles in two years, with Sledgehammer and Raven backing both when needed. However, from 2012 to 2019, Activision adopted and continued a new model with Call of Duty: Treyarch, a Call of Duty game, then Infinity Ward, then Hammer, and then repeating that order. This appears to be about three years between every game they make for each studio, making it easy for Activision to maintain its annual Call of Duty release schedule.
In 2012 Treyarch released Black Ops II and went on to make 2015's Black Ops III and 2018's Black Ops 4. It released Infinity Ward Ghosts in 2013, followed by 2016's Infinite Warfare and 2019's Modern Warfare. Sledgehammer released Advanced Warfare in 2014 and then WWII in 2017 - the developer is scheduled to release their third Call of Duty game in 2020, assuming the trend continues, followed by Treyarch's next game release in 2021.
Or at least that should be the plan, but Activision has not confirmed whether this is the case. According to Kotaku, Activision was handling the 2020 Call of Duty release a little differently, partnering with Raven with Sledgehammer to tackle the project together, like how Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer partnered in Modern Warfare 3. It would break the Activision model.
However, according to the same Kotaku report, things didn't go well for Sledgehammer and Raven, so Treyarch is now the studio in charge of 2020's Call of Duty. Sledgehammer and Raven were reportedly working on a Call of Duty set during the events of the Cold War, but tensions between the two teams (with both the Sledgehammer founders leaving the studio and several developers following the case) have caused delays. Both Sledgehammer and Raven have reportedly been reassigned as support studios for Treyarch, which is said to be working on Black Ops 5, with the game launching in 2020 - a year early.
Activision hasn't confirmed any of these, but recent announcements are at least closer to the idea that the 2020 COD release will, to some extent, depart from the tradition the publisher has been up to these eight years.
