Xbox developer Treyarch is following up 2024's Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 with Black Ops 7 later this year; that being the first time Black Ops has seen to back-to-back releases in series history. Despite the upcoming title being set in a completely different time period to last year's effort, a senior developer on the team has admitted that there's some worry this could lead to franchise fatigue.
In an interview with CharlieIntel (via Dexerto), Treyarch’s Senior Director of Production, Yale Miller, was asked if he was concerned about a double whammy of Black Ops games these past few years. Here's their response to that:
"I think the honest answer is yes. I worry about that [...] Obviously, there was a plan with the two MW games and then this. We’ll see what the franchise does in the future. We’re excited about the opportunities it gave us, but we’d all be dead lying if we said we weren’t worried about that."
The 'two MW games' part of that quote refers to Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3, which also launched back-to-back in 2022 and 2023. Despite MW3 turning things around towards the end of its life cycle, it launched in a stripped back state; especially the short single-player campaign which was a big factor behind our 6/10 review score a few years back.
It sounds a little bit like Black Ops 7 could follow a similar trajectory to MW3, then. Of course, we don't know how the campaign will fare just yet, but Miller went on to say that "we’re absolutely going to bring it from a content perspective in our live seasons", so it sounds as though the team will aim to build and improve on the game as the year goes on.