New 'Call of Duty' Game to Release in Holiday 2016: Rumor Round-Up

Activision announced this week that the new "Call of Duty" game will release this holiday season. It will be brought to you by Infinity Ward.

IGN reported that the developer change is in line with Activision's three-year development cycle. Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer and Treyarch are the three gaming studios that have been taking turns in making a new "Call of Duty" game.

The latest iteration of the widely-successful first-person shooting game is "Call of Duty: Black Ops 3." The current-gen title was developed by Treyarch and was made available to the public in November 2015. Sledgehammer's "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare" released in 2014 while Infinity Ward's "Call of Duty: Ghosts" launched in 2013. The latter was the first title in the franchise to be playable on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

GameSpot speculated that the next instalment won't earn as much revenue as its predecessor. This is because Treyarch's critically-acclaimed title is scheduled to receive several post-release DLCs down the line, making it the heftier choice for first-person shooter fans.

Infinity Ward has yet to talk in-depth about the upcoming game. However, the company's producer Mark Rubin has hinted about the possibility of the franchise going into outer space, per Game Zone.

"Everything's on the table. When we start a new game every possibility's on the table," said Rubin. "If we think that it'd be cool to have a battle over Jupiter, sure. Why not?"

For now, we can only speculate as to what the next instalment will have in store. It's a sure bet that Infinity Ward will still keep the core gameplay mechanics that has made the franchise so well-received by fans for almost 15 years. Of course, the gameplay mechanics will be slightly enhanced. 

Activision announced the new game as part of its freshly-outed 2015 earnings report. The company revealed that it grossed $2.12 billion during the fourth quarter of last year. Video game DLCs were the main income-generators for Activision. The California-based gaming studio made $780 million off of digital content alone in the last quarter of 2015.

Activision was unable to reach the revenue it grossed in 2014. For the entire fiscal year of 2015, the company reaped a whopping $4.62 billion. The sales figure was just a tad shy from Activision's 2014 earnings of $4.81 billion.

The "Call of Duty" series continues to be a hot commodity, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. Venture Beat pointed out that the series has been dubbed as the most popular video game franchise for the last seven straight years. The combined revenue of all its games is estimated to be $15 billion worldwide and $10 billion in the last 10 years.