In today's financial results call, Activision announced that three studios will work in parallel on three different Call of Duty titles that'll be released cascading in an annual schedule.
Up until now, two studios has been releasing new Call of Duty titles in alternating years whereas Tryarch is responsible for Black Ops games and Infinity Ward is responsible for Modern Warfare games. This setup allowed each game to take two years in development.
Starting this year, Sledgehammer Games will start working on "Ghosts" as a new sub-franchise in a three years development cycle.
According to Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg, this move aims to give the studios "more time to focus on DLC and micro-DLC," and "more time to polish."
"Looking forward to 2014, as both Bobby [Kotick] and I have said, we have a superlative game in the works, and that we have some new approaches this year that we think are going to be very positive with the three-year development cycle -- with the injection of some new creative leadership from some very talented folks at Sledgehammer Games, and we think that the 2014 game is going to be one of, if not the best, Call of Duty game ever," said Hirshberg.