There are rumours claiming that Sledgehammer isn’t going to be developing the 2020 Call of Duty title. Who will take over then?

Activision Blizzard releases a Call of Duty each year by rotating the title between three teams since 2014. They are Sledgehammer Games, Treyarch, and Infinity Ward (and they release the games in this order – the cycle started in 2012, but we count from the entry of Sledgehammer…). In 2019, Infinity Ward’s game is next (which is likely going to be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4…), and in 2020, Sledgehammer SHOULD be next, as their last game was in 2017 with CoD: WWII… but it looks like that is not the case!

Kotaku reports that the publisher’s original idea was making Sledgehammer and Raven Software work on a Cold War Call of Duty game, but it was „recently” changed, with Treyarch stepping in with Call of Duty: Black Ops 5. Sledgehammer’s and Raven’s work will not be dumped – it will be changed into the single-player campaign of Black Ops 5, which would also have the Cold War setting. Sledgehammer and Raven would thus slide back into a support role.

The reason behind the sudden switch was that Sledgehammer and Raven often argued over the development of the project, and the tension caused it to be a mess, according to two people close to it (while others claim that the two-year development cycle is concerning, and others say it’s good that they have a fixed plan for the game). The game is set to come in the autumn of 2020, as a cross-gen title, meaning not only the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, and the PC would get it, but also the next-gen PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Kotaku also reports that Activision’s executives are closely inspecting the free-to-play model, which could be used in the 2019’s Call of Duty title, but a few of them are reluctant, and nothing is set in stone yet.

So there is trouble around Activision…

Source: Gematsu