Subscription-based Game Possible For Call of Duty Franchise

It’s pretty easy for us to say that the Call of Duty franchise has become one of the best and most successful video game franchises of all-time. Now that it has reached that status, it’s likely that’ll we’ll start to see the Call of Duty brand expand to different types of games. Might as well start with a subscription-based game, right? That may be the case if we correctly read in between the lines of what Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said during today’s company financial call:

“If you think about the success that we’ve had in other product categories on subscription, you can get a sense of the direction that we want to take that franchise,” Kotick said of the Call of Duty series.

Kotick didn’t confirm anything, by any means. But like he said, we can get a “sense” of what they want to do. Activision Publishing president and CEO Mike Griffith also spoke during the financial call, and reconfirmed that a new Call of Duty title will be out annually, among other things.

“Our strategy continues to be to annualize our key franchises. We’ve indicated before that Call of Duty is on a two year development cycle given the content and work that needs to go into a high-quality game experience,” Griffith said during the financial call. “We also have new business models potentially for the franchise in the future and we’ve been building capabilities on both the business development side as well as the studio side of it.”

Last November, Activision Blizzard CFO Thomas Tippl stated during the BMO Capital Markets Conference in New York City that the company plans to launch new online business models for its top franchises, which just happens to include Call of Duty.