The video game developer best known for its work on the Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero franchises is trading in its skateboards and Les Pauls for AK-47s.
“We have molded our team into a crack squad of eager developers ready to push the first-person action genre in support of Activision’s Call of Duty franchise,” Neversoft says on its website (via Blue’s News).
Founded in 1994 and bought by publisher Activision in 1999, Neversoft is now the fourth subsidiary to work on the Call of Duty franchise along with Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games, and Treyarch. It’s not known at this time if Neversoft will support the other studios by creating content for the Modern Warfare and Black Ops series, or if it will create an entirely new COD game.
While four developers working on one franchise might seem like overkill, keep in mind Call of Duty is a massively popular money-maker for Activision. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 earned one billion dollars in sales in the first 16 days, eclipsing a record set in 2009 by the film Avatar, which reached the same milestone in 17 days. And it looks as if the upcoming sequel Call of Duty: Black Ops II could be even bigger; first-day pre-orders of the game on Amazon beat Modern Warfare 3’s pre-orders by 30 percent.