Activision once again confirms a "full" premium Call of Duty game is coming later this year

Despite reports to the contrary, Activision is moving ahead with the usual plan to release a premium, "full" Call of Duty game this year. Although the publisher revealed practically zero information about the game, it did confirm that it's happening.

As part of Avtivision's Q1 2023 financial results, the publisher said to expect the game "later this year," alongside Warzone Mobile.

Although we used to learn about the yearly Call of Duty releases by now or even earlier in the year, recent iterations were instead revealed much deeper into their respective release years. If this trend continues, don't expect to hear anything about the upcoming game until later in the summer.

This might be why Activision has yet to even announce who's leading development on the project. Since the introduction of the three-year/three-studio cycle, it was quite easy to call which studio would be making the year's game. But that cycle has been broken, and the different major studios tend to contribute to every Call of Duty more these days thanks to unified tech.

For months, reports have indicated that Activision may be about to break its yearly release cycle for Call of Duty, but there was no consensus on what the publisher plans to slot into that schedule instead.

There was always the possibility of some sort of premium content, but until Activision outright confirms what that is, we can't say for sure. Reportedly, Sledgehammer Games is working on an expansion to Modern Warfare 2, but it's not clear how much content we can expect.

Whichever studio ends up leading charge on the next game, it will likely tie significantly into Warzone 2.0, similar to what happened with the original Warzone. If the game is indeed in the Modern Warfare universe, this transition would at least make sense in both thematic and gameplay terms.