After Bloomberg broke the news on February 22 that 2023 will be the first year without a mainline Call of Duty series release in two decades, Activision has refuted the report. Many reasons are cited for the delay, including the lack of met expectations from the last installment and focus being shifted to a free-to-play title.
“The company is pushing off the release after a recent entry in the series failed to meet expectations, leading some executives to believe that they’re introducing new versions too rapidly,” Bloomberg reports. “The decision was not related to Activision’s agreement to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for $69 billion.”
Activision has since denied the Bloomberg report’s claims. In a statement to Digital Trends, a spokesperson for the publisher says: “We have an exciting slate of premium and free-to-play Call of Duty experiences for this year, next year and beyond. Reports of anything otherwise are incorrect. We look forward to sharing more details when the time is right.” Digital Trends asked for clarification on whether that meant a mainline game is still planned for 2023 and will update this article when we receive a response.
The report states that Activision is working on upcoming projects to fill the void left by this lack of Call of Duty. One of these titles is a new Call of Duty game set to release in the fall that Bloomberg reports will receive constant content updates.
There is also a free-to-play title in the works that is launching in 2023. Developer Treyarch is reportedly shifting its focus to that project instead of working on the next mainline title. This new FTP focus stems from the success of Call of Duty: Warzone and the underwhelming sales of Call of Duty: Vanguard. Bloomberg reports that Warzone‘s success and the subsequent release of Vanguard led “executives to suspect that it had been cannibalized by the previous year’s game.”
While the status of the game is up in the air, Microsoft’s purchase of Call of Duty’s parent company could change the plans of the next mainline title after the deal’s finalization in summer 2023. Microsoft previously noted that the series will remain on non-Xbox platforms moving forward.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.