Call of Duty
video game franchise

Call of Duty (CoD) is a first-person shooter video game series and media franchise published by Activision, starting in 2003. The games were first developed by Infinity Ward, then by Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software. Several spin-off and handheld games were made by other developers. The most recent game, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, was released on November 14, 2025. The next game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, is scheduled for release on October 23, 2026.
The series originally focused on a World War II setting, with Infinity Ward developing Call of Duty (2003) and Call of Duty 2 (2005) and Treyarch developing Call of Duty 3 (2006). Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) introduced a modern setting and proved to be the breakthrough title for the series, creating the Modern Warfare sub-series; a Modern Warfare remastered version was released in 2016. Two other entries, Modern Warfare 2 (2009) and Modern Warfare 3 (2011), were made. The sub-series received a reboot with Modern Warfare in 2019, Modern Warfare II in 2022, and Modern Warfare III in 2023. Infinity Ward has developed two games outside of the Modern Warfare sub-series, Ghosts (2013) and Infinite Warfare (2016).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q192156. The Library of Congress control number is no2024092847. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 5 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2025, 2026 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Call of Duty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.