Up until 2025, Call of Duty has, somehow, been stuck getting cross-generation entries. But following some rumours circulating over the past few days, Activision has come out and confirmed the next game won’t be releasing on PS4. Last year’s Black Ops 7 will be the last eighth-gen instalment.
On 3rd May, leaker Alaix claimed on X that “MW4 is currently being playtested on PS4”, which sounded kind of worrying considering how rough the more recent entries already were on the last-gen consoles. However, Activision shared on socials the following day (through the official CoD account) that “the next Call of Duty is not being developed for PS4”.
This would make the next CoD the first proper current-gen release, one that’s arriving way later than we’d have expected a few years ago. For reference, 2015’s Black Ops 3 was the last game released on PS3, two years after PS4’s launch in 2013. It’ll be six whopping years since the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S’ arrival in late 2026. Then again, this generation of consoles has been an odd one and consistent player attachment to PS4 and Xbox One has been impressive.
A new Call of Duty targeting PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC could also sport much-needed, core-level design changes and tech improvements that represent another major push for the enduring military FPS franchise. Ask around and the general sentiment – even if each release still captures millions of players – is the formula has slowly stagnated again since 2019’s Modern Warfare “rewrote” much of the rulebook.
It’s still unclear what this year’s CoD will be – though rumblings suggest it’ll be Modern Warfare 4 – but we’re not too far away from the usual announcement at this point, and it appears Activision and Xbox aren’t slowing down the franchise’s yearly release schedule even if Black Ops 7 made them rethink their approach to back-to-back entries in a same series.