Former Call of Duty creative director Greg Reisdorf on how the series must evolve, what he’s doing to fix some of the biggest issues in gaming, and why he dreams of a Grand Theft Auto in space

Greg Reisdorf has called on the creators of Call of Duty to learn from Star Wars to bring more variety to the franchise in an exclusive interview with Esportsbets.

The former Creative Director for Multiplayer, who worked on titles including Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Call of Duty: WWII, and Black Ops Cold War, also shared his views on the Grand Theft Auto franchise and the one area where Rockstar could never compete with CoD.

In a wide-ranging interview, Reisdorf explained what he’s been working on since leaving Sledgehammer Games in 2024, to co-found Oncade and work on some of the biggest issues developers and publishers face to make original ideas work in the world of gaming.

Read the full interview below.

How much pride do you take in having helped to build the Call Of Duty franchise into the juggernaut it has become?

I take a lot of pride in what it is now, especially all the games that I’ve worked on. They were quite impactful on me as a designer, as well as learning leadership skills. All those things.

It’s interesting because I wasn’t there at the beginning. I came in right after Modern Warfare 2 shipped with another studio so Infinity Ward had done that game and Treyarch were there and there were a lot of studio dynamics going on, which is always interesting.

It was a lot of building, which was fun. To this day, I can say I worked on Call of Duty and people know what that is. If I say I worked on Dante’s Inferno or Godfather, everybody asks: “Godfather, wasn’t that a movie?!”

Stepping away from the development of a AAA franchise like Call Of Duty, has it felt like a breath of fresh air or do you miss it?

It’s super interesting. When I started, I went to school for game design and basically started right out of school trying to do my own company.

We started doing hardware-accelerated stuff for Intel before hardware acceleration was really a thing. It was the ARM processor. It was just a platform for Dell. It was way way back when we still had these little styluses and everyone was still asking “why don’t you use the stylus to move everything?”

It all started there. I was in northern California in the Bay Area right where GDC is every year and we’d drive down to LA for E3 too so a big part of my early career was indie grassroots, digging in and making things happen.

As soon as I was cold calling all these publishers and they were like, “whatever kid, get out of here!” I came to the realisation that I should probably go and figure out how real developers do this. Then I went and worked at EA for a while and then Activision. That was a very interesting experience.

It was very siloed at Activision. For a while, it was a Sledgehammer policy where we weren’t allowed to go to GDC. They didn’t want us recruited. That’s since gone to the wayside due to some management changes.

Because it was all siloed, you were only talking to Activision people and only talking about Call of Duty constantly, all the time. It’s great when you’re working on Call of Duty but as soon as I stepped away from that last year, and I quit January 10th so about 11 months ago, I realised there’s a whole world of people here that I haven’t talked to that have been part of my career and part of the industry.

Reaching out to all these people, there’s always that sales call aspect where they ask, “Greg, why are you talking to me? What do you want from me?” But I say no, I just want to catch up, but I also want to see if they’re interested in this thing. It’s been very fun connecting with all these developers.

On the other side, there is a big piece of it missing from working on Call of Duty, which is that you just show up with a Call of Duty game and you know you’re going to get millions of players. Anytime you do a press release, somebody will see it. Now I’m here typing up my LinkedIn posts thinking maybe 10 people will look at this one. It’s been quite a different journey, but it’s really exciting after having worked on Call of Duty for so long.

What’s your ambition for your current projects and your work at Oncade?

What we’re doing right now is super interesting because it’s game-adjacent.

We’re talking to a lot of developers to try and help Indies and AA studios get more bang for their buck because there’s so much stuff you can do with new technology that just didn’t exist previously.

When we were working on Call of Duty, we wanted to do revenue share options and creator codes. At some point, Call of Duty was making so much money they just didn’t care anymore. They don’t need creator codes whereas Indies would love that. I can match up an Indie or a newer streamer who wants to help out and they want that rev share. If they market this then everybody wins.

It’s a very new and interesting market to be in. Staying small is a key part until we can really find the right niche. We’re finding that a lot with UGC platforms. We just announced a partnership with Endless Adventures, which is doing Adventure Forge. That’s Jordan Wiseman who did BattleTech and Shadowrun, all these games I grew up playing that made me a designer. Now I get to talk to him all the time like “dude, this is so cool! We can do all this crazy stuff!”

We’re powering all of the UGC side for them. If you are a creator and you go in there, just like Roblox does, but Roblox has this huge backend team to manage, they have accountants and all that other stuff, and you don’t need that with us. You just sign up and you have it and you’re able to redeem virtual currency and all that, so there’s a lot of cool aspects to it. Hopefully we can grow UGC platforms and make it more accessible to more people so we get them out there. That’s what is really exciting to me.

Eventually, we’ll have more and more of those partnerships but keeping it as small as possible lets us be nimble. I think we have about 10 people right now, from engineering to biz dev. We also use AI now too, which is able to make a lot happen but it just means we have a lot more senior people. It’s an interesting space.

I’m also tinkering with my own dev stuff, making my own little mobile games to experiment and use what we’re building to try UGC stuff out and try our virtual currencies out. The world of AI is going to be very different in five years or even a couple of years for video games.

In effect, is the idea to offer those smaller operators a chance to build out their business by offering them the sort of mechanics that the Roblox model ultimately uses to make money?

It’s all about sustainability and using your community to grow.

At Activision with Call of Duty, we called it the content treadmill because once you start going, you have to fill the pipe with content and you are constantly always behind.

The people who are willing to spend money who just spend it all and then you haves and the have-nots who are the people who have time but can’t participate in the money side.

With a distributed community, you can have the people who have the time to use it to create UGC and content other people might want to consume. You’re almost pulling the developer out a bit so the developer can sit back and make new stuff and the community can grow that.

It’s like the Steam Community Marketplace for CS:GO. It’s huge, it’s fantastic and it does 1.8 billion a year in transactions where they take their 15% cut but that money stays in Steam. It doesn’t leave the Steam wallet. It doesn’t go anywhere. You can’t make a career out of that. We offer the other side of that where you can have a marketplace, do all the trading you want, and pull that money off Oncade.

There’s a lot of devs who want to go and participate in that and that’s our end goal. When we were first talking to devs, they’d say, “that’s cool, but I’d really love to have a game that people played first.” So we went closer to the rev share side, figuring out how we could work with creators and get them rev share on game sales and key sales. We’re starting to see more and more pickup from publishers who are interested in that.

Eventually, we’ll get to a point, where we have established games, we can start to create those marketplaces and have creator live events because that’s what this enables. Having a community rev share model that is able to participate in the growth and success of your game means you can have events with rewards which becomes really cool.

While we’re talking about the business models behind gaming today and how smaller teams can monetise their work, where do you stand on the looming idea of the $100 price tag for games in the AAA space?

It is economics at that point. The expectations are so high for those games.

A Call of Duty is at least four games in one. You have Call of Duty Zombies, the campaign which is huge, the multiplayer, usually there’s something else, and then there’s Warzone as well.

Warzone’s free which is interesting that that’s still a thing that’s free and available to play. We’ve seen a huge uptick in free-to-play games, and free-to-play games come and go. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on releasing them and then die the next day.

Splitgate is revamping to arenas soon, so we’ll see how that does for them, but that was rough, right? And we see a lot of games doing that.

It’s much more interesting to have a premium game with a light microtransaction offering rather than free-to-play. I think free-to-play is probably going to go away, not complete but become more like those UGC platforms like Roblox or Fortnite.

A $100 game is going to happen eventually. You just don’t want to be the first person to do it. All the publishers are waiting. The Outer Worlds got tagged with the $80 price tag and they didn’t even know it.

I’m sure Grand Theft Auto VI could do it and they would still do gangbusters and everyone would still be excited about it because it will be quality. You get what you pay for, right? GTA Online is huge too with all those servers and everything else that’s running it on the custom side, which has serious costs to keep going.

It’s super interesting, especially for what we do at Oncade. If you want to do virtual currencies on private servers, come talk to us as that’s what we can do for you too, no problem!

GTA is going to do it and break the $100 mark depending on when it actually comes out. It’ll be out there soon. I wonder how the Call of Duty pipeline is changing for that shift in release dates now.

Does the release schedule of Call Of Duty make it harder to ask players to pay $100 every year or even every other year compared to Grand Theft Auto that at this point takes a decade or more to release?

Once you do it once, and stick a $100 price tag on your game, it’s just going to go up across the industry. Other games will follow.

I don’t think Call of Duty will be the first one to do it but at some point the market demands it. Your investors are going to be asking why haven’t you done this and the costs to create these games are super high.

Sometimes I think I would love to go and make a game but I look at the budgets needed and think I’d have to get so much investment or I’d have to get a lot of people to work for nothing. The quality art directors and map designers and all those people that I know aren’t going to work for peanuts!

Was there a sense of competition between Treyarch, Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games and was it healthy rivalry or did it sometimes spill over?

The biggest competition was the other studios. That’s always how it was.

There was a lot of tech trading and at some point everybody had their own engine and then they merged them and it created conflicts around who’s doing what features and how long things are out and all that sort of stuff.

That was normal. Everywhere I’ve worked had that. Even at EA back in the day they had RenderWare, which was a platform that was an engine and then they were going to unify the engine, and then all engineers got upset because they were doing it a different way. You learn to work within all of that.

Where it becomes more interesting is with design decisions and how you go about tuning weapons or movement settings. I think there’s a healthy attitude of believing this is our style.

For Sledgehammer, it was always interesting because you have Treyarch on one side who are doing a very arcadey thing over there, and Modern Warfare on the other which is more of a hardcore Mil-Sim. Where do you fit? Can you be more arcadey than the arcade guys? Do you find the middle ground? That was always the debate.

It was healthy for the most part but you don’t go out of your way to ask, “hey guys, what do you think of this? We’re going to change your entire system. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

You’re always asking yourselves what features to take from the previous game into the next one, and how do you handle that? What are the sacred cows? What are we not going to touch? What are we going to touch? How are we going to do that?

Now they’ve announced they aren’t doing the back-to-back releases in the franchises anymore, which is pretty great in the grand scheme of things. Hopefully that will open them up to more creative things.

I was always in the camp of using the brand like what Disney did with Star Wars. Open it up to all different types of scenarios and media forms. Maybe we’ll see more of that based on that message to the community. I don’t know if that’s what the message to fans was meant to say or just: “we know, we’re listening, please don’t leave us!”

If you did take that Disney-esque approach, what new directions would you want to take the Call Of Duty franchise?

Call of Duty in the Roman times? That’d be pretty cool. You could do all that. I think I might’ve pitched that a couple of times to firm rejection. Call of Duty: Spartan Warfare?

But look at Star Wars. They have different media. It’s hard to do that with war, right? Star Wars is doing it because it’s a little more fantasy oriented but you could take Call Of Duty to different scenarios and different visual stylings as well just to mix it up.

I’m not there anymore. I have no idea what they’re talking about. These are just pipe dreams. At one point I pitched a Call Of Duty game where you’d be riding giant ants, so I don’t know how that works. Maybe they’re happy to be rid of me!

On the decision to stop the back-to-back releases, will that give the teams more time to invest into doing new things in a more creative way or could they lose some of the discipline and tempo needed to deliver in such a short turnaround time?

I don’t know. It’s an interesting thing. We always said in a three year development, you waste the first year. You just throw it away because you’re just messing around. You have all the time in the world, even though you don’t really, but it doesn’t really matter because there’s two games ahead of you that are coming out and they’re going to dictate what needs to happen.

So you just hang out and work on some stuff and test out some new mechanics. That’s where a lot of the boost jump stuff came from in Advanced Warfare. We had time to mess with that and try it out. But you also get to release and you decide you didn’t want a boost jump, or you get three years back-to-back of boost jump.

Working on the 2023 version of Modern Warfare 3 was nice because we didn’t really have the time. We had to make decisions. We had to go. This is what we’re going to do. This is what the community said about the last game. These are the things that we can address.

It was very cut and dry. These are the areas that we’re going to focus on. We’re going to try and land these things. The team did a fantastic job. They were going super hard at responding to fans on the same day that DLCs and live seasons went live.

Coming out of all that, you sit back and say OK guys. Let’s stop, think about something new, and by the way, figure out what these other two games are going to be doing from teams you talk with every now and then, and figure out what players will want then. That’s not an easy thing to do.

Were those three year cycles actually a big part of the magic of the Call Of Duty franchise to just get it done and work with real discipline and speed?

Yes, just get it done. For decision making, more time leaves room for doubt compared to when you are just cranking something out.

I loved live seasons because you could test things. You could put it out there and see if it works. Did somebody respond to it?

We had so many things going on in the Modern Warfare 3 live season that I like to frame it as a startup. We’re just going to do this and then we’ll see if we get a response to it. If we get a response, then we’ll go and make it.

Get High was a great example. We were super nervous about it. We slowly leaked stuff out and walked into it and the response was okay. So we released it. We could have just said “hey, it’s a joke. We’re not doing it.” But everybody loved it so we followed it up with more content that was similar to that.

That’s great because you get that immediate feedback whereas when you’re in your three year cycle, you have all the designers questioning you. Everybody’s coming at you. The other studios are coming at you too because if you second guess what they’re doing a year ahead of you then you’re saying “no, that’s going to fail. We’re going to do this thing!” Then they are going to be like: “well, no!” Because they haven’t released yet.

They have to go and convince everyone else that their idea is better or they’re going to have to take your idea and jam it in somewhere earlier, especially if their game is not so successful. So there’s still a lot of struggle in the three year cycle.

It’s a very different place now to when I was there. I think it’ll be great for what they’ll be able to do. I know the team is going to just rock it at Sledgehammer. That team is pretty intact too. It’ll be interesting to see.

There’s been such a focus to try and reduce or remove “crunch” from the development cycles of games but did the intensity of that three year cycle make it so that the first year of work had to give the team some downtime?

It was a bit like that but I think back in the day, it was certainly that coming off Modern Warfare 3 into Advanced Warfare but also nobody really knows what they’re going to do.

You’d have people go off and work on tech stuff. It’s the same everywhere. Even at EA, working Godfather or Dante’s Inferno you push and push and push to launch the game, and there’s usually a little offset where the Creative Director, Executive Producer and the tech guy go off into a corner to talk about things. Then six months later they bring it out to the rest of the team and they’re like: “this is what we’re going to do!” Then everybody is like that’s stupid, why would we do that?! And you’re like: “yeah, that’s right. We shouldn’t do that.” It’s constant.

Game dev is full of fallacies. Just talking to independent devs and smaller devs, you see similar things cropping up, especially if they’re a medium-sized team. If they’re small and know this is what I want to do, they can be very focused, very vision-driven. It’s great. You’re just like you go do that, that’s awesome, but you should probably think about how you’re going to make money so you can survive later.

It’s such an interesting world. Games are hard. Games are really hard. For those midsize, AA and triple-I games, it’s going to be hard because you’re trying to break into that market.

Probably what you’ll see is similar to those live ops. You have games that are trying things out because you can make a game so quickly now. You can prototype in UEFN [Unreal Editor for Fortnite] or Roblox. You can have a formula that works, and you think it works because you had a hundred thousand people play your UEFN game, but then you realise that’s because they have the distribution and you didn’t. Nobody sees your game so it doesn’t work.

I think you’re going to see a lot more of those smaller teams trying things out. Once they find something that hits, then the publishers will pile on, throw money at them. They’ll get more money, assuming they even need it at that point, and they might be able to find it within those platforms.

You’re looking for the vision at that point. Does this idea resonate? Does this have a signal? As opposed to do the team have the technical chops to make it happen? You have two engines now, Unreal and Unity, and a slew of people who are competent at working in those engines.

I know there’s the debate on Unreal and whether it can really hit 60 frames per second. I’ve had a lot of debates on Unreal and the network side, and what you would have to do to match a Call of Duty in Unreal, and it’s a hard problem to solve, but you could do it. Nobody has  done it yet. I look forward to the day when somebody does that.

What was one big decision or feature you and your teams brought to Call Of Duty that, looking back, had the greatest impact on the franchise as a whole?

For Advanced Warfare, we had the loot boxes. Loot boxes have become this pin cushion, right? But the entire loot system was a reward system, and the loot boxes became the monetisation system on top of it.

The actual reward system of being able to get rewarded with different weapons, different outfits, all of that stuff, is huge to the franchise. When we were pitching that, the response was: “we’re just selling bacon skin guns for $2. Why would we get rid of that and try this reward system out?” That ended up being huge for the franchise as a whole.

I look back on that and think it was awesome that we were able to do that and bring this aspect of the 3D lobby in too to show off what you’re doing and there’s a ton of small things on the gameplay side that have happened over time. It’s just been refined and refined, like hit markers, the instant response, you spend months looking at how your interaction with the controller presents on screen.

How does that provide feedback to the player? What are they hearing? What are they seeing? What are they feeling? I know all the pro players turn off vibration right away because it’s annoying but there’s this idea of the feel, the weapon feel.

There’s a lot of cool, interesting stuff that’s been pivotal to the game as a whole. You just don’t really see it in other franchises, that second-to-second combat. You still don’t find it anywhere else.

How important is the single-player aspect of Call Of Duty and AAA titles as a whole?

I still think it’s super important to the team. Usually, they’re broken up into several different teams including a multiplayer team and a campaign team. They’re linked at the top around creative direction but like any game the storytelling, that human connection, is still super important.

There was a point in my career where I took the view on single-player that we don’t need it but then Halo Infinite released and  playing it felt so sterile. It was not interesting as a player.

You then realise the value of having some of those real-world fantasies you get from the campaign. I’m in this situation. This is what’s happening. I’m on the Halo, I can see the ring. Those things are really impactful to a player. When you’re a dev, you’re playing that map a hundred times, but when you’re a player, you play it maybe twice. If you don’t have that content there, you’re not going to keep them with the game unless you’re an e-sport player trying to make money.

It’s a very key piece of what makes Call of Duty, Call of Duty. Black Ops 4 didn’t have a campaign and that was pretty rough. I’m not sure how it turned out with Black Ops 7 on their campaign. I haven’t heard anything about it, so I don’t imagine that was a good decision.

Is single-player gaming at risk given the rise and rise of the battle royale genre, free-to-play and online experiences?

It’s interesting. The obvious thing is to say I’m going to ditch my campaign so I can focus on multiplayer or free-to-play multiplayer and bring people into the funnel but that’s very much a mobile mindset.

The problem is there are so many free-to-play games. You’re not only competing against other free-to-play games, you’re competing against Netflix. You’re competing against time. You have to find that time from people. If you can’t create a compelling experience to get them in the door, which is the campaign, then you should have that.

Bring the players in with that and then figure out how to monetise. Otherwise, you’re just spending way too much on your game. If you want to make Roblox or whatever, you’re going to spend a ton of money making that, and now you have to make a bunch of money to make it profitable. That’s the downfall.

You’ll probably see many more games trying to find that niche first, build that community, and then start layering in monetisation or community monetisation.

Is GTA: Online the perfect riposte to the idea that you don’t need a single-player experience in that case given how that’s become a monster by feeding off the single-player interest in the base game?

I can only imagine how everybody right now in the private server world is ramping up to support all the GTA Online support they need once the new game comes out.

They all want to jump in on that gold rush because they know they have players, an audience, and a game. All they have to do is support it and create the live ops.

The nice part that Rockstar has done is saying that we’ll fire off some events, but we’re also going to allow our community to do things and work with them in some ways. It’s really cool to see that. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the free-to-play games when GTA comes out and a new version of GTA Online launches.

Fortnite and Roblox have a different audience but the Warzones of the world, the free-to-play mature titles, are going to have real trouble.

Do you look back on Dante’s Inferno as the right game at the wrong time given its incredible art and setting and the success of the FromSoftware titles since?

Dante’s Inferno was more of a God of War game. It really wanted to be God of War. I think a lot of that team actually worked on the latest God of War sequels.

The combat designer, the lead level designer from God of War 2 was on it. He was the lead designer. There was so much that we were doing. It was trying to create a very story-driven experience, which was great because all the camera control was very finely tuned. That’s not something you’re getting from FromSoftware, which are much more open world, RPG experiences.

Dante’s Inferno was more focused on what it was trying to do, and it did a great job. I don’t think it changed gaming in any way but it was certainly interesting to work on. It was a very different opportunity for me to go from an open world, third-person game to a camera-driven, action-based combat game.

But ultimately, I’m not a huge God of War fan. The old ones, God of War and God of War 2, were tough to play for me. I think the quick-time events were a little rough, especially coming from a PC. I was very PC-oriented back in the day. That transitioned me into more of a console player. But it was certainly fun to work on. And the team was great.

I believe they did plan to put out a Dante’s Inferno sequel called Purgatory. They had started on the second one but then they canned it after poor sales.

To re-release and re-master Dante’s Inferno now, I think you would go down the FromSoftware route but keep it small at first and try to ease into it. Don’t go full bore and make a giant nine levels of hell. Make one and test it.

The mechanics were there but you’d have to change all of them. There are so many characters in the actual poems that are super interesting. The character design and animations on Dante’s Inferno were crazy. The lust demons were nuts.

There are so many interesting characters from Pan’s Labyrinth or Guillermo del Toro’s work that you could pull in too. FromSoftware has some of that, but there’s so much more you can do with big boss fights that are actually interesting.

Maybe it’s a little easier to sell a game based on that Eastern mythology and philosophy than something from the West and the Catholic tradition for a game like Dante’s Inferno. As soon as you start picking at the Western religions, it can get a little rough. But that’s the cool part. If you start getting into smaller, visionary teams that can really drive and use the pre-made tools, whether it’s Unreal or Unity or even AI to offset some costs and push on those, we might start to see more of those very opinionated games come out. That is my hope.

Games that aren’t trying to sell to everybody. They’re trying to sell to a very narrow audience. They know who it is for and they don’t spend a ton of money where they have to sell to a huge audience. They can spend enough to be at narrow focus, get enough to continue to build off of that and build a franchise.

Do you think that’s the problem with the AAA scene with the size of the budgets making creative risks

The size of budget and lack of risk is an interesting concept because the indie community can take risks. They can go and build something. It’s that next level quality. There’s a lot of interesting games happening at the indie level that just lack discoverability but they lack marketing to make any sort of dent. You have a few that just punch through and become viral hits. Those are our key targets. They need a partner.

Some of these creator-driven games are also interesting to look at. I was just talking to some at a Unity event, God Forge. They’re creators who started their own studio. It looks pretty cool. They’re building a community around that as they’re going to launch. That’s totally the way to do it. They also have investing. Hopefully, their investors don’t clamp down on them too much.

Have open worlds always been at the core of your passion for game development?

I enjoyed the challenge of open world game design from very early.

With Godfather 2 there was a lot of building out those worlds and maps and figuring out how to do it. It was very hard without jump!

With Godfather 1, it was about player agency. Figuring out how a player can attack the rackets, go through the warehouses differently. We did it really well in Godfather 1. The idea that the missions came out of the world and followed the story of Godfather was pretty awesome.

But ultimately, when we shipped Godfather, it was very rough. The expectations were super high. They thought this was going to be GTA but it’s a very different game than GTA.

Building those open worlds was a lot of fun but building open world third person is tough. There are a lot of restraints. GTA VI is showing it takes a long time to build it and do it well.

Do the delays to GTA VI concern you?

Rockstar have the time to do it right. I hope they’re pushing on the right things.

You get to a point where you have external reviews or play tests and you start getting feedback saying this doesn’t work or that doesn’t work. Hopefully, they’re past those issues and it’s just polish time now, knowing what it needs to be and getting it out the door with the proper support.

They are not pushed on time. They’re still making money off of GTA V. Why mess with GTA VI when you can just take your time and do it right?

Is there anything you’d like to see Rockstar bring to the series with GTA VI to mix up the formula and bring in something new?

I am a huge fan of the Saints Row series. I would love to see insurance fraud or some of those types of things brought into the game for GTA VI. After all, that would be very ‘Floria Man’ to get something like that in there. It does have those vibes.

Where GTA falls down for me is in combat. It is hard for me to play any game that has shooting mechanics because coming from Call of Duty, everything else is just trash.

I would love it if they actually focused on the combat stuff and it wasn’t just this throw it over the wall, third-person combat where you crouch and you can shoot over this box and it automatically detects the wall.

Give me some good first-person stuff. That’d be great. For me, that is what would keep me there. There’s no other game you would ever need to play at that point.

Did GTA V bringing in first-person only expose that gap further?

For sure. You get into more of the console play with aim assist because of the difference between third-person and first-person, when you can have a first-person view model, you can go in there and set animations and really refine it and make it awesome. That is huge.

If you’re doing it in third-person, you don’t get that fidelity, or if you just move the camera in, you don’t really get that fidelity.

Was there any sense of a rivalry during your time on Call of Duty to see Grand Theft Auto as a rival as they made guns a bigger part of their game?

No, nobody cared. It’s more of the marketing aspect of it and the cultural relevance between the two franchises. That was the bigger impact. The gun play was like man, whatever.

That’s pretty much true with any game, to be honest. Nothing else has really come close to the gun play experience of Call of Duty and I can’t think of anything else that came even relatively close.

Maybe Rainbow Six? That had some stuff that was getting closer. XDefiant was nothing like it. Splitgate 2 is a very different game. It’s ok. Even Delta Force tried to get closer and they should have been closer because they had worked on some Call of Duty stuff a long time ago. But it’s not really a competitor. Arma 2 wasn’t really popular in the mainstream enough to compare with.

Call of Duty is just such a cultural icon at this point. It’s only really GTA that you’re competing for time against. It’s Fortnite. Fortnite put a dent in Call of Duty: World War II when we came out with that one. I remember playing Fortnite when it came out and I was thinking it wasn’t that great but then they released the Battle Royale side and players just went over there.

You’re competing for the same set of players between games at this level. Roblox has its own audience, which is younger kids. Those kids are all going to grow up and play somewhere.

If you’re going from Roblox to Warzone, that’s a pretty rough move. I think it’s Roblox to Fortnite and then I don’t know. How did Ballistic do? That was like the first-person Fortnite but I guess it died. Maybe that could have been competition to Call of Duty.

How do you even compete with these games in these niches given how established they have become in the space for what they do?

Unless you’re bringing something huge, new or truly different. To do it right now I think you’d have to do something like a 1 vs 1 single map that is very dedicated, you spent all your time on gunplay for the best gunplay ever, per shot. That would be super interesting.

It would almost be playing Max Payne every round. You hit someone in the shoulder, it shows the bones breaking like in Romeo Must Die. You could do that in a way that’s impactful. Something people want to watch. Have the pros go and do it.

But it would be very hard to do it from a cultural standpoint to create something just as big that’s going to kill Call of Duty. I think the only thing that is going to kill Call of Duty is Call of Duty from the bad decisions that you make or the community just moves on in some way. At some point you can just miss the boat, culturally.

Given the mixed response to Black Ops 7 are we at a bit of a tipping point like that now?

The company usually responds well to these things. It’s about how they’re going to respond.

It will be back to a boots on the ground approach. They are going to push. They want people to think we’re back! If people are kind of tired of it, let’s switch. If they’re tired of this other thing too, let’s switch to another thing.

It’ll be interesting if they get to a point where it is very different each year whereas right now it’s like a single stream of consciousness that veers off based on the flavour of the month. They know what works for them. They’re going to determine that.

I am a variety guy. I love variety. Advanced Warfare was great for making that distinction to make it stand out but that’s me caring about the franchise, not caring about keeping my job as an executive.

There has been so much turnover at the executive level for a while. You get different people coming in thinking in different ways that every corporation goes through. I hope it goes back to these small teams who have a real vision of what they want to create. That gets super interesting if some of them start to hit.

I think it was Shovel Knight where they made a ton of money, it was great, and they took six years on the next one. I love that. Those types of games are awesome. I hope there can be more developers like that who find success and are able to maintain their vision.

Do Activision need to try and find some of these smaller teams like how Disney and Marvel have gone to indie film makers to make new MCU films, to go and find development teams with a vision to unleash on the Call of Duty franchise and its budget?

I don’t think that’ll happen but it’s great to think about. I think you get a lot more examples like Riot where they’ll go and buy a studio and say you’re successful doing this thing. We’re going to buy you so go do more of that.

They may find somebody who’s making a decent first-person shooter but then you have to bring them into the whole Call of Duty engine situation. That would take several years when they’re starting downhill and haven’t figured anything out yet. That’s probably not going to happen.

Could the future of Call of Duty look like using the game’s mechanics to partner up with other franchises and IP like how we saw with Total War: Warhammer or Lego’s partnerships with various brands and series?

I love Warhammer. We even had Warhammer 40k in the live season for Modern Warfare 3. We had Juggermosh, where you were a Space Marine and able to fight and run around so using the Call of Duty engine for first-person shooters and being able to license entire games to that system would be a huge win, but it’s such tribal knowledge of what’s happening in there and how all that works. That would be a stretch.

But that would be awesome. You could have a Cyberpunk game with Call of Duty shooting or a GTA title within Call of Duty would be fantastic. There are lots of things you could do with it.

On the multiplayer side, how do you listen to the internal data versus the loud voices on Reddit, social media, streamers, and your own team’s views when making tweaks to balance and formats?

I have always had an interesting opinion on this. In my career, I found that entry-level designers can be the most obnoxious people. I was one of them. You’d come in and think that this is going to be awesome. We can do it like this.

Then you have the mid-level designers who are trying to make a career of it. They were that ambitious guy and got beat down so hard, so they say turn around and say no, we can’t do that. Here’s what we’re going to do.

Then you have the creative directors who say that we’ve got to do something big and impactful and it’s about really listening to the junior designers and having the power to make decisions on that, and getting the mid-level designers to really think about it.

It’s similar for the community because you’ll get the community pushing for something. From a creative director standpoint, you have to say we have to listen to this person. Let’s go do this thing and tell me how bad it is if we do this.

If the consequence is you weren’t able to work on your pet project, cool, we’re putting that in, instead. It’s about giving power to those people, really looking at it, and listening to what they’re saying.

A lot of what I did was empowering the team to listen to the community. The community is saying this. Did you fix it? No? Well, maybe you should go fix it and if anybody gives you trouble, tell them to go talk to Greg!

There was constantly a Slack thread saying look at this, so-and-so said this, this creator has a problem here so let’s fix it. That would happen all the time.

A lot of it is solving the pipeline issues. How quickly can you get builds to market? Can I just flip a switch on the server and have it changed?

QA is also a problem with the bigger games. They’re huge. If you’re a super conservative team, you want to test everything but I say let’s just push it out. Make sure we have a way to turn it off. If there’s a problem, we turn it off.

Then the community will say that now we’re QA testers but you either want the change or not.

We had a lot of legacy stuff from Modern Warfare 3. The community wanted red dots. We wanted them too, in fact. Some of the more nuanced things around sights and scopes, we had a designer who came out of QA doing a lot of the weapons for us, and he was an amazing designer, listening and going we can do this. I can make this change for the community. We had to figure out how it goes into Warzone and all this other stuff.

It was a huge process but at the same time that junior designer was able to say this is what we can do. This is how we can do it. I’m listening to the community. It’s about backing that value up and saying no, we are doing this.

It’s about being able to have the humility to admit when we were wrong.

Skill-based matchmaking has been a hot talking point. I think Black Ops 7 has a more limited skill-based matchmaking system. What’s your view now?

I’m not sure if they turned it off or if you have a playlist that would not have it.

That’s interesting because the thought is that all of the sharks who don’t want skill-based matchmaking go into the no skill-based matchmaking and they eat each other. Then the top sharks are the only ones in that pool. It’d be interesting to see what that data looks like or why they’re having to send messages apologizing.

What do you think would be the optimal match-making system if you could wave your magic wand?

It’s really difficult. Most games don’t have that problem because they don’t have enough players to care about skill-based matchmaking. Then you have games like Fortnite that are just pushing bots in there.

The bot solution is a good solution. You have skill-based matchmaking, then you have bots to backfill the very bad players. If you don’t have bots, you’re going to squeeze your population and they’re just going to go away without any skill-based matchmaking.

I think skill-based matchmaking is a good thing. You have a very vocal community that wants to be able to feel like they did well. As soon as you inject bots into the lower bracket, you can have everybody feeling good about themselves.

Otherwise the experience becomes a case of guess what? You just got slaughtered in your last couple of matches. We’re going to over-index and put you lower so that we can float you back and forth.

When you start doing that across millions of players, you can’t just lower everybody because then you’re with the people who were just lowered with you. There are huge complexities.

I don’t think anybody really cares about the complexities. They just want to do well. You either fake them out at some point or you expose it like the old Halo days. At least then I would know where I am and know why I lost.

Being more transparent about it would probably be the best road and then use bots to fill the lower players out so that when they get beat up, they don’t leave. You’ve got to keep the sheep available for the wolves.

What did you make of EA going private and the concerns of fans over Mass Effect and other IP?

When you go private, everything changes. When I was at EA, the question every single day was how are we increasing shareholder value today? Hopefully, now that they’re private, they can actually take more risks.

When you get into Tencent buying everybody up, that gets a little scary. They have the mobile mindset behind everything. Everything is data. They know exactly who you are, what you’re going to pay for, and if you’re not going to pay, they’re going to jam ads up into your experience. Hopefully, the more you get more privatised companies in games, which I think is the way to do it, then you’ll start to see more risk-taking.

I am hopeful for Mass Effect. Maybe we will get another game. Maybe they’ll turn it into a GTA in space. That’s my hope. Somebody needs to make that someday. There’s a couple of space games I’ve tried to play that are not quite there. Elite Dangerous is super old. Star Citizen has potential.

There’s also some hope that Warner Bros Discovery being bought out could lead to the Nemesis system patent under WB Games potentially becoming available to license or use by other studios. Is that a feature you’d have loved to play around with?

Yes. It’s fabulous. They patented it and I would totally try and go around it but you’d have to look at the patent and see how you’re going to not do whatever is patented about it.

When you’re a giant corporation, they actually say don’t look at any patents because if you look at a patent, it means you acknowledge it, and if we do the same thing, we don’t have any defense later.

It would be great to see it in more games. We had a system like that in Godfather where we had a hit system that let you go after a whole chain of people right up to the Capo. Those are great little systems.

In Godfather 2, specifically, there was a whole thing going on in the background where you could send people off to attack other rackets. It was a very cool idea. There are a lot of random patents sitting around in the games industry. You just don’t know about them until the last minute!

Would you like to see a Nemesis-style system or some of those features from The Godfather games you worked on brought into GTA VI?

That would be pretty cool. There are a lot of mechanics in Godfather, like the rackets to territory control stuff that would work.

I remember building out a Flash prototype way back about a Civ-style cultural takeover where you could take over a racket because it was in your area.

I also made a cool zombie prototype with the Godfather engine where you go to your safe house to get away from the zombies. It was a board up the windows type of thing.

Saints Row had zombies too. I think Saints Row was fabulous with their zombies mode. I’m sure if they allow people to mess with it at that level and have that amount of customisation, that’d be great in GTA too.

There’s so much you could do if they are thinking about it as a customised game mode, creating even more role-playing possibilities. Here’s this world, now do your role-playing in it.

You could do the Shadowrun aspect and put magic in there. Do the Cyberpunk thing. Just use the GTA world and their mechanics and put your story on it.

If Rockstar tapped you on the shoulder and said we want you to bring your own vision to GTA 7, is that what you would do?

A Grand Theft Auto in space with magic. Isn’t that just GTA: Warhammer 40k? They’re not quite in the GTA cultural space, but they’re close. I think you could do it.

I’d lean more into the customisation and allow for it because they’re already doing it so why would you fight against it?

You have all these people making careers off of your game. You can employ them and get to create more stuff inside the game. You build the tools out, then it becomes a pipeline of players from Roblox to Fortnite to GTA. You flip into this adults only world and you’re in crazy land.

They want to be culturally relevant so allowing creators to push those boundaries and make their own worlds, that would be cool. I can go to Gregland and that’s where Greg makes all his stuff.

What sort of celebrity interactions did you and the team have when working on Call of Duty?

We always wanted more of it! To get people involved trying to participate and make some modes. We were getting close on Modern Warfare 3 where we were moving quick enough. You started getting some more of that with the partnerships around Halloween stuff. The Terrifier partnership was interesting for that but those are IPs, not individuals.

Timothée Chalamet came in for Dune which was interesting because he is a fan of Call of Duty but he didn’t give any feedback on the actual gameplay. Snoop Dogg just did not care but it was fantastic to be able to use him. Cheech and Chong didn’t care either.

There were some other ones early on that wanted stuff but it’s just crazy off-the-wall things. Why would you want that? It’s usually a map or something where we spend millions of dollars and we’re not going to make that for you. I think they had a creator control group that existed to probably keep them far away from the dev team.

I really enjoy talking to the community. I’ve done some podcasts after the fact, because when you’re at Activision they won’t let you do it, and there is some very insightful commentary from creators. They’re the fans. They’re the people playing it more than the developers, honestly.

Something like creating a map out of Snoop Dogg’s mansion, I would imagine they would do that in a heartbeat. It would have to be someone at that level. Michael B. Jordan was into it for a while. He was super excited about some stuff but we never did anything with him.

Once you start getting into all that then it can become a royalty conversation. How much money am I getting from this?

Do you think fans and critics realise the impact that scores on platforms like MetaCritic can have on developers?

At EA, your bonuses were based on Metacritic performance, for certain individuals within the organisation.

Publishers base stuff off of that all the time on what their recoup is or what terms they’re willing to give you.

Same with reviews or even wishlists. I didn’t know that wishlists were such a huge thing but a lot of times publishers will look at it before they give funding to gauge interest, whether or not those wishlists are actual intent.

There are companies that will bump your wishlists because they offer monetary rewards for that sort of activity. They aren’t going out there giving players money for wishlisting a game but if you do this activity we’ll give you something, so you’re not actually getting a return on that. You’re not getting a sale.

There’s so much more importance out of reviews. For certain developers we’ve worked with, they want to get their game out there, they just want to see reviews. They really cherish them or they look at them and think this guy said it didn’t work on his 20-year-old computer and now I’ve got to go and optimise it!

It’s super meaningful to them but I remember seeing it with Godfather 2 on the day it launched. 45 on MetaCritic. To me, that means the game doesn’t even work.

Is there anything you would like to see change in the games criticism space?

The Game Awards surprised me. Maybe this is common knowledge but you basically have to pay to get into the Game Awards. I didn’t know that for the longest time.

Everybody that’s up for an award is always paying to get in with the hope of winning. You’re already overlooking a bunch of games that may have been great but don’t have the resources to enter, or the desire to pay for it.

The review space is really tough for actual, genuine journalistic reviews. There is such turnover in games media and sometimes nobody is getting paid. You’d have one or two writers and it was their side job to write about games because it’s their passion. For such a massive industry to not have proper critical feedback – it’s hard to trust a lot of reviews on some level.

We would pay reviewers to come and do mock reviews of our games. That’s something you do in the industry just to see what they think. Sometimes they were right and sometimes they were wrong and it would create tension within the dev team. Who is this writer? Are they a designer? Why are they telling me this? It was hit or miss, and that was probably the main source of income for a lot of those journalists.

What we’re doing at Oncade is trying to create this ability for communities to share in the success of a game. I could refer a game to you right now. You could go and buy it and I would get paid for it. I would get my chunk, the developer gets theirs, and everybody’s happy.

We actually make more money than if we sold it on Steam. It’s still a Steam key so it’s kind of a weird situation how their model works.

This idea of creators being able to drive their audience towards things and be that voice and finding your game, because there are so many games out there, to be part of the community, enjoy it, and thrive with it, is a cool way to think about it.