10 Times Publishers Sabotaged Their Own Video Games

6. Cutting Black Ops 4's Campaign - Activision

It's been clear for a long time that not everyone who buys Call of Duty ends up playing the single-player. For the most part, players are there to hop online and shoot at or with each other in PVP and PVE game modes, but even with Treyarch's CoD games boasting a particular focus on the latter in Zombies, it seemed a wild suggestion in 2018 that they would ever cut the campaign altogether.

And yet, that's exactly what happened. Leaks that came out just before Black Ops 4's official reveal claimed that the studio hadn't been able to put together a single-player campaign over fears the game wouldn't meet its August release. The studio later repudiated those reports just after the game's official announcement, stating that they "never started with the idea" that a "traditional campaign" would be a part of the final launch.

But here's the thing, even in that conversation with Polygon, Treyarch head Dan Bunting qualified his comments by speaking at length regarding Call of Duty's playerbase, with the implication being that the studio had to prioritise those areas of the game because that's where most of the attention is.

Even so, why should they have to prioritise at all? There's no getting away from the fact that studios don't get a say in when the next CoD releases. Delays are non-existent when it comes to that particular franchise, and it doesn't seem disingenuous to assume that the campaign was sacrificed in order for Black Ops 4 to meet its release date.