As a developing video game critic about Call of duty 20 years ago, I made one of the worst mistakes in the industry: I felt “Call of Duty” had no future.
In 2003, I was at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles when a uniformed Army man approached me and asked, “Hey, wanna play some ‘Call of Duty?’” He appeared cheesy. The game itself seemed to be a knockoff of the well-known Medal of Honor series, the first to invoke “Saving Private Ryan” in an action game.
I had no idea that the creators of Medal of Honor had moved on to Activision to produce “Call of Duty.” And I had no idea that the Call of Duty series would become one of the reasons video games have become the world’s largest-grossing entertainment industry.
On October 29, 2003, “Call of Duty” was published for PC platforms. An ambitious computer game created by a team of 27 individuals that attempted to simulate the sensation of a boots-on-the-ground infantry battle.
Today, almost 3,000 people work on Call of Duty, a series with enormous financial potential; last year’s “Modern Warfare II” earned more than $1 billion in 10 days. Call of Duty is the fourth best-selling game franchise in history, after Mario, Tetris, and Pokémon, with over 425 million units sold in 20 years.
Almost every year since 2009, a Call of Duty game has been the best-selling game. Its most recent product, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III,” is set to be released in November and will be the first title from publisher Activision Blizzard under its new owners, Microsoft. After more than a year of legal wrangling, the tech titan paid $69 billion for the game’s publisher.
Sony PlayStation executives battled to keep the series available on their platform in court filings, stating its tremendous popularity with PlayStation users and that the brand accounted for at least $1 billion in sales for Sony in 2021.
Despite its status as one of the gaming industry’s golden geese, competition has pushed the franchise to change its business strategy over the last two decades, according to franchise general manager Johanna Faries, a former NFL marketing and business development executive.
“There are so many different genres, so many different platform dynamics to consider,” Faries said in an interview. “It’ll all come down to amazing gameplay; that’s the heart of the experience.”
But it also impacts how we think broadly about where we show up and how we connect with different verticals across various entertainment mediums, so it indeed seeps into a more significant, broader discourse.”
Dissatisfied with Electronic Arts, some “Medal of Honor” creators left to join Infinity Ward in 2002, hoping to compete with a game concept they invented. They were successful: the Medal of Honor series is almost extinct today, while Call of Duty has established itself as the dominant military shooter brand.
Infinity Ward created storylines from several Allied Forces perspectives in a trilogy of games based on World War II conflicts. By the third game, early twentieth-century warfare had become a worn genre. In 2007, Infinity Ward released “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,” which not only became a big hit but also transformed how online multiplayer games are constructed, designed, and monetized.
Its influence may still be seen in modern online games, from “Fortnite” to “Apex Legends,” the EA-published game created by former Infinity Ward executives who have returned to the publisher.
“Modern Warfare” not only became the blueprint for online competition, but it elevated it. It moved faster than any other game on the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, made it simple to discover other partners, and encouraged limitless replayability with the promise of new weaponry and aesthetic bragging rights via online medals.
Subcultures and enterprises in the gaming industry scrambled to catch up. “Modern Warfare” led a 14-year-old Atlanta teenager named Keshav Bhat to co-found CharlieIntel.com, an online business covering Call of Duty news, with a friend in June 2011 – an early example of a website and social media account dedicated to information surrounding a single game genre.
Bhat stated that gaming news sites did not provide enough timely coverage and that he wished to fill that need. Dexerto, a digital media business that covers gaming and esports, purchased the site in 2018. Bhat, now 27, is Dexerto’s chief of social media, and CharlieIntel on X has 3.6 million followers.
“Call of Duty’s legacy is bringing friends together to enjoy content online in a way that not many games were able to do,” Bhat said, adding that he founded CharlieIntel to assist in concentrating a previously dispersed online community. “I’ve met people in 2011 that I still talk to today thanks to Call of Duty.
Call of Duty also became a rarity in the gaming industry, with an annual release similar to the Madden or NBA 2K series. According to Bhat, the release schedule has helped Call of Duty grow to roughly 100 million gamers every month in recent years.
The series continued to follow the “Modern Warfare” model of selling new content, such as maps and modes, separately. It experimented with the setting, employing the Vietnam War and a fantastical sci-fi future as story backdrops, and it kept selling.
According to Sensor Tower estimations, the franchise finally entered the smartphone arena in 2019 with “Call of Duty: Mobile,” an app that was downloaded 250 million times in its first year. In 2020, the PC and console series debuted “Warzone,” a free-to-play game inspired by mobile games and popularized by “Fortnite.”
A-list celebrities such as “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington have appeared in stories throughout the series. “Warzone” is now occupied by players posing as Nicki Minaj, Snoop Dogg, 21 Savage, and Bruce Willis.
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Celebrity tie-ins are part of the franchise’s effort to widen its appeal beyond its roots as a military simulator, especially as real-world wars continue.
“Only reinforce that this is entertainment; this is here to find and make friends after a hard day at work or school,” Faries went on to say. “It’s really about joy and creativity at the end of the day.”
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