Call of Duty: Ghosts is not going to be a very innovative game. You will shoot dudes, probably brownish dudes, and this time you’ve got a dog that will either survive or whose death will bring about the Internet Apocalypse. And according to Infinity Ward, that’s because Call Of Duty players are casual gamers.
It’s a weird thing for Mark Rubin, an executive producer at Infinity Ward to say, and he’s going to get flamed for it. But the thing is, the guy’s got a point:
They aren’t hardcore gamers, or even gamers, but they play Call of Duty every night. And those guys are going to continue to play regardless of platform. So I think not only will we continue to engage with that existing player base, but we’ll take next gen and see how far we can go with it.
Rubin goes on to argue that this is why Infinity Ward and likely by extension Treyarch can’t shake things up, as much as they’d obviously like to. He likens it to football; you can’t aggressively change the rules of football every single year, just occasionally, like when the refs blow a call and you need to save face.
While it’ll probably enrage a certain subsection of the Call of Duty audience that actually plays something else, Rubin’s point is actually fairly intriguing, and it raises a few questions. If Call of Duty isn’t a “hardcore” game, in the sense that people who dig into video games and want more and different kinds of gameplay, that raises the question, first of all, of what is, and secondly, what this means for an industry that arguably still believes the Call of Duty audience is their ticket to Activision’s stock price.