meh it's basically a Madden now. There'll be up and down years but it'll never die.
I disagree about it being Madden. If you're a football fan then Madden is literally your only option. EA has the NFL license and it doesn't appear that they're going to be letting it go anytime soon. Other companies have given up even attempting to compete with Madden because they don't have the NFL license. You also don't expect much innovation with sports games because there really isn't much wiggle room when you're aiming for a sim.
That isn't the case with CoD. There's nothing stopping another company from coming along and overtaking CoD. And EA has already said that it's their goal to take CoD down. That might've seemed like a fantasy to some, but CoD's sales are down and Battlefield has turned into a legitimate contender. They also have a FPS by the CoD creators (Vince and Jason) coming up. That's obviously going to receive a ton of marketing and media attention once it's unveiled.
A lack of innovation is a big reason why CoD may "die". It's obviously something that isn't going to happen over night, but it's not a good thing to have yearly releases of a brand that many people view as being $60 map packs. That's an especially bad strategy when that game is in one of the most competitive genres in gaming.
People are quick to point at the fact that CoD will probably still be the best selling game released this year. But that's ignoring that one of the things that Activision liked bring up about the sales of the series is that each entry outsold the last one. In other words, it was always a growing brand even though it was already extremely popular. This will be the first time that they can't do that. Does that mean that they should be freaking out because their big money maker is in trouble? Not necessarily, but they should be looking at ways of making the brand fresh. And "Elite" is far from being the answer to that.