Why Activision Stopped Making Games

3. The Fate Of Activision's Dev Studios

In fact, those limitations are already present in the way the publisher has reshuffled the development studios they own to focus on the few franchises they have left. The three major ones - Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer and Treyarch - are all spearheading their own Call of Duty sub-series to ensure there's a new title hitting shelves every single year. While this set up wasn't effected by the shift in business priorities, the narrow focus on COD has impacted studios who had otherwise previously been free to create their own games.

Raven Software (Singularity), Beenox (Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions) and Radical Entertainment (Prototype) now all help out on the Call of Duty franchise in some capacity, whether that's working on the main games themselves, creating ports to other platforms or crafting remasters of older titles. Other studios like High Moon (Transformers: Fall of Cybertron) and Vicarious Visions (Skylanders) have been limited to helping Bungie produce Destiny content, rather than making their own original games.

Though it's a little relieving that Activision haven't shuttered these studios - which have been in charge of some childhood favourites over the years - by restructuring them and limiting their role to primarily be helpers on the company's two biggest franchises, it's hard to see the publisher's team of studios as anything more than individual cogs in a massive machine, rather than vibrant, creative original forces in their own right.