Will Call Of Duty ever be popular?

The Monday Letters page asks if data mining is taking the fun out of game announcements as a reader tries to imagine an Xbox without Microsoft.

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War without end
Now that we know Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 is coming out this year, we’ll have leaks for months until it comes out in the fall and the whole thing starts all over again. Then in January we find out that it was the first or second most successful game of the year, as always. So… will it ever stop?

Microsoft hinted that it might stop annual releases before it bought Activision, but of course that all came to an end when it’s one of Xbox’s main sources of money. But ignoring all that, is there anything that will ever dent Call Of Duty’s popularity? That it’s not always one of the biggest games of the year?

I personally don’t see it. If something as bad as Modern Warfare 3 doesn’t turn people off, nothing will. And while soldiering is theoretically something that’s easy to copy, no one has managed to do it in the last 20 years, and every year Call Of Duty is massive, the mountain to climb just gets bigger and bigger. I really think Call Of Duty will be around in another 20 years and be as big as ever.
Campbell

Data leak
Personally, I agree with the idea that datamining and most leaks in general spoil the fun for fans, but I place the blame entirely at the feet of the publishers. First, they don’t seem to be trying to hide any of this information, suggesting they want it to be found, and second, the complete lack of any official announcements these days means we have to get our information from somewhere.

I just wish there was some way to data mine the PlayStation and see what Sony is playing at the moment. Although I suppose no one is crazy enough to put their business plans in random computer code for anyone to find. No, they leave that to the job ads.

Oh and once again, guess who will never be datamined? Nintendo. What a shocking realization that they are being reasonably careful with their information and no one else is.
Gnasher

People in leadership
I enjoyed the Reader’s Feature over the weekend about the people responsible for gaming and how they clearly have no personal interest in video games. I would go a step further and say that the real problem is that they have no interest in the long-term health of the industry. Bobby Kotick would laugh until he burned if it meant he could make an extra $1 off of it, but the likes of Phil Spencer apparently don’t care either.

What will he think when he looks back at this industry in 10 years and everything is in shambles? Unbalanced by this, the entire industry is pushing for Activision Blizzard to buy and yet destroy the future of Xbox hardware in the process. Or Jim Ryan when he realizes he was the one who ruined 30 years of dominance with a mad rush to make risky live service plays.

The truth is that no one should be in charge of creatives but the creatives themselves, and yet they are often useless at it. This isn’t a gaming-only problem, but gaming is particularly bad at handling it.
English

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Crazy George
Mad Max by Avalanche Studios was great. I wish they would remaster the game with all the DLC they planned. No disrespect to George Miller who is a world class film director. But he obviously doesn’t know video games. I can’t think of anyone worse than Hideo Kojima to make a Mad Max game. It would be a cut scene of Kojima doing his best to impress his hero.

I’ve never been on the Kojima train, but I recognize his talent for directing action scenes. I never understood why he didn’t turn his talents to directing movies? I’ll put it this way, I’d be more interested in his directorial debut than his next video game.

Good for former developer Avalanche Studios for speaking up and defending the game. I would call the game a cult classic. I won’t hold it against George Miller, I can’t wait to see Furiosa. Mad Max: Fury Road was amazing.
Anon

Turning point
With rumors of a Blue Dragon return (remaster I assume?) I think we might be underestimating how influential this game was on the Xbox. Microsoft put a lot of effort into funding and marketing at the time and… did absolutely nothing for them.

I’ve never played it, but every comment I’ve heard about it is that it wasn’t very good and just kind of generic, despite being made by the creator of Final Fantasy. I wonder if its failure, while it seems to tick all the right boxes, isn’t why Microsoft just gave up on Japan and didn’t think it was worth it.

I’m sure there were many other things that went into this decision, but it seemed to have an impact.
SterlingC

Too much money
I realize this is just a fake rumor, but even the thought of Microsoft buying Valve gives me the heebie-jeebies. If that were to happen, I’m guessing that either the FTC would win this time and prevent it, or (perhaps more likely) after a few years of it proving to be an absolute disaster in terms of competition in the industry, Microsoft would be busted and forced to sell out Xbox as a standalone company.

What do I care if they had better luck? It seems increasingly obvious that a lot of their recent decisions are driven by the people above Phil Spencer, but if they were separate they couldn’t afford Activision Blizzard or maybe even Game Pass.

I know he’s an easy punching bag at this point, but I still have a lot of time for Phil Spencer and I suspect that if he made his own decisions, he could probably handle things better. More importantly, he wouldn’t have endless Microsoft funds to fall back on and would have to build first-party studios much more quickly and organically than he did.

I honestly think having too much money is Xbox’s biggest problem, and knowing they can always raid their parents’ bank account if something goes wrong has held them back more than helped. Although I suppose most of the damage is done now.
Focus

Total cat astrophe
I just wanted to commend you on your review of Little Kitty, Big City and for not making a single cat-related pun during it, which is no easy task for a journalist.

Anyway, it looks like a fun game, if not quite perfect.

Stephen, Manchester

GC: The slogan for the review was “cat’s meow”.

Eternally self-deprecating
So we’re just a few weeks away from Xbox’s summer show, and if rumors are to be believed, it’s going to be a hot mess of mixed signals about their future in business and a capitulation that more of their games need to be multi-format.

The thing that makes this so bizarre to me is that Microsoft has released a stream of diverse and interesting games for the first time this year, and both Sony and Nintendo currently have nothing at all planned for the rest of the year. You’d think it would be a sigh of relief from the Sbox camp that things are finally going their way and they can regain some ground.

• Hellblade 2
• Open
• STALKER 2
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

The only problem I see is Microsoft not being Nintendo and trying to make the 9/10 games necessary to take the console to new heights.

Hellblade 2 is a bit of a Marmite game, and I respect that some, like yourself, find very little fun in it, while others find it exceptional as a visual and story package, with functional but lackluster gameplay that doesn’t detract from its other qualities.

Avowed is from Obsidian and the legacy of Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: The Stick Of Truth and The Outer Wilds should have role-playing nerds salivating… it just seems there is complete indifference online and from critics (maybe everyone is just thinking about the Alpha protocol).

STALKER 2, with the original being highly respected and the added weight of coming from a Ukrainian developer, should have a huge buzz and has real potential to be a very good game.

Then Indiana Jones, which I’m sorry, but MachineGames’ idea of ​​a first-person Indiana Jones game is as close to a ‘take my money’ moment as you’ll ever see.

If everything goes right, you’re looking at the first page output of three Metacritic games 90%+ and one game 80%+

But this is Microsoft… in its current form nothing is bankable and chances are one of these games will be pathetic (not Indiana Jones please) and the others will turn out to be 70% games.
Irve77 (gamertag / PSN ID)

GC: If there’s one point of consistency among all video game companies, it’s their unerring ability to miss an open target. The indifference towards Avowed is purely because no one knows anything about it – Microsoft barely mentioned it, yet it apparently came out this year. Same with STALKER 2.

Inbox is also running
My predictions for Switch 2 are as follows: it will be an improved version of the current Switch with additional upscaling of existing Switch games. That is all.
Frantiska

GC: You’ll really be out there.

I agree 100% that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is the best game for Nintendo. I’m playing the remake right now and it’s exactly what the game deserves.
Townsend

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