Believe it or not, Call of Duty 4’s success may have something to do with re-igniting the franchise by taking it out of the stone age… or World War 2 setting. Now, Activision sees a successful new road map for the series and will be doing it again from a different military theatre.
Call of Duty 5 will build on the franchise success while the iron is hot by designing Call of Duty 5 in it’s image (again, no WW2 it seems) and releasing it across a wide array of consoles: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, Nintendo DS, Wii and …PS2.
The Wii and PlayStation 2 consoles are great targets for a new game because everyone and their grandmother has one of these older styled consoles. Graphics might not match that of a PS3 or 360 but when it comes down to sheer numbers, money talks. If I were trying to sell as many units of a game as possible I’d start with the console that has the most number of units in the field; it’s a sensible decision.
CoD4 didn’t arrive on the PS2 or Wii so they may have lacked some sales, but the fourth game in the franchise, by sequel number anyway, still blew away sales figures for many months in a row. Imagine the power of the franchise on the two consoles everyone seems to own.
“We’ll bring the intensity of the recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare title to a new military theatre to engage our significantly larger user base which nearly doubled last year as new users came into the franchise,” added Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith.
Translation: “Holy crap, people like Modern Warfare and must be sick of the seven thousand World War 2 shooters on the market today.”
Don’t get me wrong, World War 2 was a huge event in our worlds history and it’s great to respect, remember and keep it strong. However, you can only see so many interpretations of the same events before you want to see something different.
