Call of Duty Says It Is Not Scared of GTA 6, Its Calendar Says Otherwise

Mark Grigsby, co-studio head at Infinity Ward, told Destructoid that the looming launch of Grand Theft Auto VI does not add any particular pressure to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. He said he has spent 28 years in the industry and feels the weight of every release regardless.

He called it healthy for the industry to have juggernauts like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and Fortnite pushing each other, and described the situation as a little head-to-head, which he thinks is great.

While it's a refreshing answer in a year where most of the industry has quietly tiptoed around November, it's also not quite the fearless stand it sounds like.

The next Call of Duty launches on October 23. Meanwhile, the next GTA comes out on November 19. That is nearly four weeks of clear air between them, and Call of Duty traditionally launches in November. October releases are not new for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 launched October 12, 2018, and Modern Warfare launched October 25, 2019. So the series brave enough to fight GTA 6 head on has, in practice, moved itself out of the way.

Four weeks is a long time in the video game industry. Modern Warfare 4 gets a month to sell, settle in, and get its hooks into players before Vice City opens for business. To be fair to Grigsby, he never claimed they were launching on the same day. He was asked whether the shadow of GTA 6 adds pressure and answered honestly that pressure is his permanent state regardless.

Interestingly, the same studio, Infinity Ward, launched Call of Duty: Ghosts in the same autumn that Grand Theft Auto V arrived and rewrote every sales record in existence. The two coexisted. Ghosts sold enormously. GTA V went on to become the best-selling premium game in history. Neither destroyed the other. There's evidence showing that this exact matchup doesn't have to come at the expense of each other.

Unfortunately, Ghosts is also widely regarded as the point where Call of Duty started losing the room. It sold fine and reviewed poorly, and the franchise spent years afterwards trying to win back players it lost around that period. Selling well while getting overshadowed is exactly the outcome that looks fine on a spreadsheet and feels different two years later.

With that said, Call of Duty and GTA aren't remotely the same product. They're probably the same in that every adult will want to buy one or the other, preferably both, and most fans grew up wanting and playing both titles. Call of Duty even has the edge of launching on multiple platforms. GTA 6 not coming to PC at launch and is not on Switch 2 at all. So there is an enormous population of players who physically cannot buy GTA 6 this year, and Modern Warfare 4 is available to every single one of them.

Rockstar has effectively handed Call of Duty an entire uncontested audience by choosing consoles only, which probably explains the studio's confidence.

Besides, GTA 6 at launch is a single-player experience. Rockstar has not dated GTA 6's online mode. It will consume people utterly for a few weeks, and then most of them will finish the story and drift. Call of Duty is a habit rather than an event. It wants twenty minutes of your evening for the next eight months, which brings us to the actual threat, and it is not landing this year.

The thing that should genuinely worry Call of Duty is Grand Theft Auto Online, or rather, its eventual successor, whenever Rockstar decides to release it. The previous version of that game held an enormous audience for over a decade and generated billions.

There is one more wrinkle that raises the stakes for Activision this year. Modern Warfare 4 is not getting the usual day-one treatment on Game Pass, which means it needs actual sales rather than subscription engagement in a quarter where GTA 6 is about to absorb an extraordinary amount of discretionary spending. Being unafraid is easier when your revenue does not depend on people having eighty dollars spare in November.

Again. None of these makes Grigsby wrong. Having several juggernauts in the same season can lift the industry rather than shrink it. The alternative, where every publisher flees the calendar entirely and leaves the market to one game, is genuinely worse for players.

Somebody had to say it, and it may as well be the one franchise with the receipts to back it up.