We already know that Activision rotates the development studios it uses for its Call of Duty titles to give extra time on each project for a team, and now we also know who is in the lineup for Call of Duty games for the next few years at least.
News has come out (via Insider Gaming) that Sledgehammer Games will be the main development team on the 2027 iteration of the successful franchise, while Infinity Ward will head up Call of Duty in 2026, with Treyarch already busy on this year’s version.
Fans of the game tend to have their own favorite studio, eagerly awaiting their turn to come around again. Treyarch has long held the crown of the overall favorite due to the standard of its recent efforts.
Sledgehammer Games is in the process of closing down its current California office space and relocating to a small premises and its employees are now expected to work from home until the end of the year. This disruption will doubtless be factored into the Call of Duty production timeline however Insider Gaming reports that the move to allow the Sledgehammer Games team to work from home flies in the face of an Activision instruction in December 2023 that all the Call of Duty QA teams in Austin, Minneapolis, and El Segundo must return to the office five days a week from this month or terminate their employment.
On November 30th, Activision QA employees in Minneapolis, Austin, and El Segundo received an email announcing that hybrid work will be ended in January for QA employees.
Below is our statement regarding this decision. pic.twitter.com/UKyRH2BggH
— ABetterABK 💙 ABK Workers Alliance (@ABetterABK) December 18, 2023
Not all staff are happy and has been called ‘a slap in the face’ by the ABK Workers Alliance (the employees of Activision Blizzard King) who believe the move unfairly “leaves our most vulnerable employees behind, especially disabled and immunocompromised employees, who have had their work from home accommodation requests denied with inadequate reasoning.”
The Alliance goes on to state, “The company moving the Sledgehammer team to a temporary remote working environment is an indication that they have the ability to grant remote work to the QA employees who have requested it due to disability, distance, or other factors, but are choosing not to.”
In an industry that has been hit by so many layoffs of late, most staff feel obliged not to speak out against their employers, but the ABK Workers Alliance seems to be taking a strong view on this one.
