We met Activision SVP and co-head of mobile Chris Plummer on the first day of GDC 2024, a few days before the global launch of Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile on March 21.
Our conversation came at a pivotal moment for Activision’s mobile arm. While its existing hit shooter Call of Duty: Mobile was mostly developed by Tencent-owned Timi, Warzone Mobile has been made in-house at Activision.
Warzone Mobile is intimately tied into the console and PC title, now and long into the future. Which also suggests it’s the one Activision is backing more enthusiastically long term, though Plummer insists it can coexist alongside COD: Mobile.
The endgame with Call of Duty, it seems, is for the platform you play it on to be irrelevant; and if that really is where Activision – and new owner Microsoft – want to get to, Warzone Mobile will become a huge part of that strategy.
There’s a lot to digest from the conversation, but for those who want the quick bullet points:
- Activision isn’t relying on organics alone and is putting ‘everything it has’ into launch marketing
- Performance and getting live service content right were the biggest challenges in soft launch
- COD: Mobile and Warzone will co-exist, with the older title almost in its own silo while Warzone syncs with the console/PC game
- Plummer takes a swipe at other mobile battle royales for being full of bots, and invites those players to “play a real battle royale with real humans”
- He suggests other publishers like EA, Ubisoft and Take-Two haven’t fully understood how to develop mobile-native live service games
- Plummer also clarifies the four ‘lead’ studios on Warzone Mobile, and we attempt to get a comment on webshop revenue plus that rumoured Microsoft app store
The full Q&A is below. It has been edited for clarity and readability.
Is UA a big part of the Warzone launch or does the scale of the brand mean that you don’t really need to do that?
We’re approaching this as a full 360 launch, so all of the different tools are being deployed. We learned a lot about the organic power of the brand through launching Call of Duty: Mobile back in 2019. And the world has evolved since then, that’s just par for the course on mobile. There’s always new things to adapt to, new rulebooks to work within.
But all the different levers that you would normally associate with a big launch plus the pieces that are maybe unique to a triple A launch are put together for a launch like this.
The world’s changed but you know, the fundamentals are still there, and you can still see which markets or campaigns are performing and where you can lean in more. So we’re putting everything we have on making sure we get out of the gate strong, but we’ll also chase success where we see success.
What did you learn from the Warzone beta, and how did it compare to COD: Mobile?
It’s a pretty ambitious thing to bring a triple-A, cross platform engine to mobile and you can count on a couple fingers how many cases there are like that out there. Getting performance on all the devices and getting the graphics to where we wanted them took a lot of time.
What it has provided though is this future-proof platform we can continue to iterate into the future. Five years from now, 10 years from now it’ll continue to look better because the technology that is shared across the franchise is always evolving.
The Battle Pass right now, for example, that has some Walking Dead characters in it and if you go to console or PC, that content is also there – our content pipelines are connected. So all of those types of things took a while to get right in limited release but we’re really happy with where it landed.
How close are you to effectively having just one COD game across all platforms?
We’re closer than we’ve ever been. We think this game will achieve this goal of connecting our ecosystem across all platforms in such a way that players can spend their time on whichever platform time and opportunity allows.
One of the reasons this project exists is that we saw this great synergy between our audiences across platforms, where we have things like a shared Battle Pass and shared progression.
It felt like it may be out of reach at the time, but that’s what we’ve been working to deliver on. That stuff is what we’re really excited about and it’s part of why we did this project in the beginning.
How will COD: Mobile and Warzone coexist? Will one eventually swallow the other or are you keeping them separate?
We’re very fortunate to have two awesome mobile titles that serve a really popular genre. It is bigger than any one title, whether it’s multiplayer shooters or battle royale style shooters, there’s a lot of different flavours and a lot of room to continue to serve that audience with Call of Duty.
Now we have a new offering that’s more for connecting to the rest of the franchise and getting that authentic Warzone experience.
I mean, when you play battle royale games on mobile, you’re basically playing a prototype or simulation of battle royale because it’s generally played with bots. And we know from talking to players and from seeing how people interact on other platforms that the real thing is real players, and we’re able to support up to 120 real players.
We supported more than that in our soft launch. It’s a tuning knob that is not a technical limitation, it is purely a design limitation of what we think is the right number.
Playing with real humans is a completely different ballgame. I mean, you’re not in the prototype anymore – you’re in the real thing. So all the folks out there who have been playing battle royale games on mobile now have something where you can actually play a real battle royale with real humans, with real graphics.
And whether they’re going to use the content across other platforms or not, it is real triple-A content of a calibre and quality that you won’t find anywhere else.
So Warzone is much more connected to the PC and console versions and then COD: Mobile is its own thing?
Yeah, Call of Duty: Mobile has always been part of the franchise. It’s got this incredible variety of multiplayer maps, It’s inspired by the franchise and it has a lot of original content as well and it’s created its own kind of flavour and flair and style that we think has a very broad audience appeal.
That said, we also know that authentic Warzone has its appeal as well – 120 real players, the latest cutting edge content, maps, operators, weapons…some people will play one or the other and as long as people engage in the franchise we’re happy with that.
What do you think Activision has done to make shooters work on mobile that others like EA with Apex Legends Mobile haven’t?
There’s a number of things that have to come together – you need to have a good development team that’s really skilled and experienced in this sort of thing for sure.
Where they really start to differentiate is in the live service aspect because people play mobile games multiple times a day and it needs to be fresh and interesting all the time.
That can be underestimated – the amount of investment and the resources and the expertise that’s required to keep up with the content and live operations. That’s where I think the success has been, and it’s also where the lack of success has been.
The expectations are high fidelity characters, vehicles, weapons…things that are not cheap and easy to make. They’re very costly and require a high degree of craftsmanship to deliver them well, and regularly and with the quantity and variety that people want.
It’s something that we’re going to do and we’ve been doing now for over a year in limited release, we’ve probably pumped out more content than all the games that ever soft launched in our genre did combined.
Why is it that the likes of EA, Take-Two and Ubisoft have struggled to bring their biggest IPs to mobile, while Activision (and Blizzard) have been much more successful?
If you’re gonna succeed on mobile, you just have to embrace it for what it is. I think where companies have struggled on mobile is in trying to adapt their traditional ways of doing games to mobile, or porting their games to mobile. That’s not how you make a great mobile game.
First and foremost, Warzone Mobile is made for mobile. It’s not a port, that’s not what players want. Players want an experience that feels native to the device.
So just coming to terms with that is the turning point for every company who’s either succeeded or failed or is adapting their model. Mobile players have different tastes, different expectations, but they love the same IP, they love the a lot of the same things – it’s just you can’t do it exactly the same way.
Which studios helped make Warzone? Is it all in-house Activision or is Tencent still involved?
Timi made Call of Duty: Mobile, and Warzone Mobile was made internally at Activision by Call of Duty studios. All those studios touch it because of the way the way Call of Duty games are made.
We have four studios within the COD ecosystem that have dedicated teams on Warzone Mobile and that’s Beenox studio in Quebec City, Activision Shanghai, Digital Legends in Barcelona and Solid State Studios in California.
The rest of the COD studio ecosystem is supporting in different ways either through building the backend technology or doing content. So it’s quite an ambitious undertaking, but we’ve developed that mobile expertise now.
Is there a lead studio who is ultimately responsible?
It’s a team effort. We have a leadership team that has representatives from the different four studios, depending on the discipline, that matrices across all of them. We found that’s worked well for us – we weren’t developing mobile internally several years ago and now we have a very experienced mobile development team across these studios.
COD: Mobile has a webshop, how much revenue goes through that webshop versus through the traditional app stores?
We can’t get into any of the financials for the business.
Will there be a webshop for Warzone?
We don’t have anything like that right now. There might be in the future, we’ll see how things evolve in the ecosystem.
Since the App Store came out in 2008 there’s just always a twist or a turn and every few years – it was the privacy stuff and now it’s what you can or can’t do on the store.
It keeps it interesting, we’re always taking a look at that and seeing if there’s value to players and to the overall business if we do these things. But right now, we’re just focused on 100% on launching or as a mobile and making that successful as it can be.
Is the model to introduce your webshop once you have a solid player base?
I don’t think we’re going to discuss our web strategy or lack thereof.
Microsoft, which now owns Activision, has said it wants to launch an app store…what do you think that could bring to the mobile market?
We don’t have anything to disclose that Microsoft hasn’t already talked about. It’s just another twist and turn in the evolution of our industry.
Epic is also trying to launch its own app store on mobile, do you think there’s room for more app stores and do you think consumers want them?
I guess we’ll see in the very near future. Whether there is or there isn’t, I don’t want to speculate.
