Former executive producer for Call of Duty, Mark Rubin, has taken to social media platform X to call out the franchise for focusing more on using FOMO-styled tactics to keep people playing the game rather than using general game quality. In his post, Rubin said that studios should aspire to be more like Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, and less like Activision.
Responding to a post by a former XDefiant player about how they hadn’t played Call of Duty in almost a year, Rubin wrote about how modern Call of Duty focuses too much on “FOMO (fear of missing out) marketing and EOMM (engagement-optimised matchmaking) matches.” Rubin also wrote about how the franchise would, in the past, focus more on having more player-centric design and would be less focused on engagement-based tactics.
“A lot of games, Call of Duty included just focus on how to make the most money possible out of the player base,” wrote Rubin. “They rely heavily on FOMO marketing and EOMM matches. But I feel like it used to be just more about the quality of the game which would drive players to play. And that means making the game more player centric. i.e. less engagement based tactics and higher quality experiences for the players. Better maps, modes etc.”
“In other words your game should have a high player count because it’s good and people want to play it rather than people playing it because the game has a $250M marketing budget. Everything is just said is very simplified as it would take too long to really go into it. One last simple analogy. Be more like Larian, less like Activision.”
Responding to another post about how even XDefiant made use of FOMO-focused marketing, Rubin said that, while this was true for the free-to-play shooter, the game had little in the way of budget for marketing.
“As a free to play game we did have fomo content although one of the features that was coming was a way to earn a currency by just playing to buy old content,” wrote Rubin. “But as far as marketing we barely had any marketing budget.”
Ubisoft announced that it would be shutting down the servers for XDefiant back in December. As part of its announcement, the company said that it would be keeping the servers for the shooter live until June 3. Currently, XDefiant is in the midst of its final season – Season 3 – which was launched back in December.
As part of its final season, XDefiant got three more playable factions – the Assassins from Assassin’s Creed, the Wolves from Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, and Blood Dragon from Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. While the game was originally meant to get four new maps as part of the season, it ended up getting 13 maps total, 9 of which were meant for release in future seasons.
While it will be going offline in around a month, the game is currently still available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review of the base game for more details.
