Rumor: Infinity Ward to be sole Call of Duty dev [update]

by Justin McElroy on Apr 22nd 2008 10:00AM

We know this runs the risk of sounding like a bad game of Telephone, but here it goes: We heard from Next Gen that they heard from an ex-Activision employee (who was formerly part of Underground) that they heard that Call of Duty 4 developers Infinity Ward recently renegotiated its contract with parent company Activision. Aside from finally getting casual Fridays and that margarita machine that Debbie in accounts receivable has been asking about, IW also reportedly got the right to be the exclusive developer of all things Call of Duty.

If true, that would edge out Treyarch (which made the 3rd numbered game in the series) after they complete work on the CoD game that they're unofficially working on. With as much love as IW put into the excellent CoD 4, we can totally understand why they don't want Uncle Treyarch to babysit the series every other weekend. But, as we've pointed out, this is just hearsay at the moment. We'll let you know if we hear something official.

Update: Activision has responded, describing the rumor as "erroneous information regarding the CoD franchise."

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Tags: activision, call-of-duty, call-of-duty-4, call-of-duty-5, infinity-ward

Reader Comments (54)

@Austin: COD4 trumps Halo 3 in terms of number of online games being played...

@Obie: ...but they're only able to do that because COD4 is a very different game from Halo 3; I doubt a futuristic space shooter would be able to compete with Halo 3

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I wish this were true, sadly the update seems to indicate otherwise. Maybe Treyarch will rethink their designs? They'd be stupid not to. But they just be stupid anyway.