I still say activision needs to stop pussy footing around and have one of these studios just pull an ow/cs:go type deal. Call of Duty: Modern Combat, loot crate the fuck out of it with customizeable character models and weed emblems/cards. Just go full MW2. Do seasonal events, have a ranked/comp mode you seriously push and balance. Price it at $30. Don't even have to make new maps, make a big part of it the fact that you're gonna pulling favorite maps from diff. eras of CoD. Carentan 2017 etc etc. Push out a big patch once or twice a year that reworks gfx, content or w/e with smaller ones frequently throughout.
Then loosen up the grip on the two other studios, hell even give them an extra year to do w/e they want so long as it's still a shooter and still fast paced. If it doesn't really hit shuffle them over to CoD as a service game.
Sadly, until the current business model stops bringing in hundreds of millions annually, nothing will change.
They wanted to do this seemingly but it was like seven years too soon with the Call of Duty service thing that I can't even remember the name of now.
I thought the extra year they added to the dev cycles didn't actually line up properly with their fixing the lack of clear development. Because now all the games have to include that second campaign/MP mode for Zombies/whatever.
They should split the modes up into separate dev cycles and each year try to have two of them out. So like this year they could have done a WW2 campaign and the throwback MP, then next year maybe it's Zombies and MP, then year after that maybe you get a campaign and zombies/aliens mode. Treyarch might not want to do campaigns anymore, so they just work on those Zombies and MP modes. And maybe IW wants to try a different "new" thing with campaigns in space and robots in MP. With Sledgehammer wanting to do historical stuff, remember before they had to join in MW3 after the exodus they were working on a third person Vietnam set game.
Selling Black Ops III's MP mode on the cheap and slightly nerfed like Rainbow Six Siege did were two of the smartest movies by large corporations in recent times, but nobody including themselves have repeated it. I'm sure next year, if Treyarch didn't do a full fledged new MP because they didn't know what to do with it, but instead did a new campaign idea plus Zombies game at $50 and also sold a BOIII Extended that added in all the DLC maps that never get discounted plus new stuff around the edges like more of the character classes at $30 new or $20 for BO III digital owners, it wouldn't dent the overall income for CoD. Hell, I'm sure they'd get enough people paying $70-80 for both.
And they'd maybe pick up someone like me who isn't a Call of Duty buyer but would consider a $20 upgrade on BOIII's MP. (Which would put me closer to $50 for the game rather than the whatever they got out of me for the MP-only pack, and then buying a key for the upgrade to the full game for $10 from some probably shady key site to someday play the campaign after demi and some others were positive about it.)
They might even be able to stumble into a situation where say WWII does really well, instead of map packs as DLC they throw out a bunch of those for free and instead do the Zombies/whatever mode as a DLC add-on first for $20. Then start doing the $15 packs. But if a game doesn't do well, they've saved on the cost of doing that third mode AND can kibosh extended DLC development outside of selling loot crates and skins.
I've never gotten the impression that Activision actually really has a Call of Duty plan outside of "make one every year" no matter what. They need a Frank O'Connor with a big grand picture in mind pulling all the levers and pushing the mythos to greatness.