After Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond exited Microsoft’s gaming division, the situation may have become a lot more turbulent.
Microsoft may have delayed the next-gen Xbox, and that could have forced Call of Duty to rethink its marketing plans more flexibly, according to a leaker. While the Call of Duty franchise has traditionally been built around annual releases, that approach may begin to shift as early as this year. The situation escalated after Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, and Sarah Bond, the president of Xbox, left Microsoft. The Redmond company announced that Matt Booty has been appointed executive vice president and chief operating officer, while Spencer’s successor as CEO of Microsoft Gaming is Asha Sharma, a former senior AI executive at the company who has taken a critical stance on the use of generative AI in game development.
EXCLUSIVE: Sources indicate to me that the delay on the next Xbox has “hurt” a lot of CODs marketing plans as they wanted Modern Warfare 4 to be a launch title and draw a lot of hype to compete with peoples attention alongside GTA VI.
Because of this delay, the idea of two Call… pic.twitter.com/e7Ce6vOaBO
— Hope (@TheGhostOfHope) February 22, 2026
Just a few weeks after the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Warzone Season 2, The Ghost of Hope claims that the delay of the next-gen Xbox console has hurt several Call of Duty marketing plans that were built around the console’s original 2026 launch window. According to the leaker’s sources, the next CoD title, reportedly Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, was originally planned to launch alongside Microsoft’s new console. Activision and Microsoft had apparently hoped that a simultaneous launch of Modern Warfare 4 and the new Xbox would help compete for players’ attention against Grand Theft Auto VI, but that strategy may now be off the table.
The leaker also claims that Treyarch could release a standalone Call of Duty: Zombies game later this year alongside Modern Warfare 4, and that it could receive multi-year support, while annual releases of the campaign and multiplayer Call of Duty games would still remain in the plans. Reportedly, Microsoft wants Activision to be more flexible with release timing and less dependent on a strict yearly cadence. With Arc Raiders and the upcoming Marathon reboot also drawing attention, it remains unclear how this revised development and publishing approach could reshape the future of Call of Duty.
So yes, it may finally happen that Call of Duty stops being an automatic annual release.
Source: GameRant, X (TheGhostOfHope), The Verge
