Activision’s CEO doesn’t mind that a lot of players prefer the older Call of Duty titles over the recent installments.

2016’s Call of Duty, Infinite Warfare, has sold less in April in the United States than 2012’s (!!!) Black Ops 2, although the reason behind the result was that the Xbox One added this game into the backward compatibility. Eric Hirshberg talked about Crash (see in a separate article) and CoD in his interview with GamesIndustry: „Call of Duty is unique, not only in gaming but culture, in that it has had an annual release and has been at the top of the charts for so many years in a row. It’s probably unprecedented. As a result, some unique benefits and challenges have emerged. One of them is that we now have multiple game universes active at one time. Our policy has been that as long as they’re playing a Call of Duty game, we’re happy.

Call of Duty is less of a persistent platform as it is a persistent ethos. It is a game that makes you feel a certain way and has certain expectations around core mechanics, tone, and manner. I feel there are multiple presentations of that, and we have shown the ability to keep people engaged, sometimes for many years past the initial launch.” A prime example of this support could be Black Ops III’s recently launched Zombies Chronicles.

This year, Hirshberg probably expects a big return to form from Call of Duty: WWII, which launches on November 3 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC – and for a good reason: it returns to the second World War.