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The next Call of Duty game will not be available on PS4 or seemingly Xbox One, ending six years of last-gen support for the series.
The official Call of Duty Twitter account addressed the future of the franchise in a post earlier today, stamping out recent rumors claiming that Modern Warfare 4, widely but somewhat arbitrarily believed to be the next installment, is currently being tested on PS4. (If nothing else, we know that Activision will "no longer do back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops," meaning another Black Ops game is out of the running for now.)
"Not sure where this one started, but it’s not true. The next Call of Duty is not being developed for PS4," the series' account writes. This post notably doesn't specify PS4 and Xbox One, but it would be unthinkable for just one last-gen console to get a port, and this reads more like Activision targeting those PS4 rumors directly.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's cross-gen release last year disappointed some fans hoping to see the series break free from dated hardware and push the bar on current-gen consoles exclusively. Granted, per our Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 review, it also disappointed in several other ways and most certainly did not push the bar.
Call of Duty has been a mass-market money machine for decades, which has long led owner Activision (and now new parent Microsoft) to target the biggest install base possible. Consequently, a lot of Call of Duty games have been cross-gen years into new console cycles. The series' PS3 and Xbox 360 support continued in some capacity until 2015, about a decade post-launch, and ended with Infinite Warfare in 2016 as the first current-gen exclusive of its time (side games notwithstanding).
Terrifyingly, the PS5 and Xbox Series X are already approaching six years old. Call of Duty games tend to be fall releases, so by the time the next entry arrives, it might actually be six years since the November 2020 console launch. With the PS4 era officially dropped as of the next installment, this generation's Call of Duty window has closed a bit slower.
