Call of Duty's post-CoD4 business model is flawed. They need to find a way to create a coherent underlying platform for each major Call of Duty brand, with a focus on long term retention, including committing to longer, more fleshed out campaigns. This is the business model Halo is trying for. Halo: Infinite is going to have F2P multiplayer with MTs, and is going to have a very sizeable campaign that gets content additions over time.
Most big MP titles are shifting towards iteration instead of clean break sequels. Warzone will get new content added indefinitely.
I feel torn because Call of Duty games are one of the only gaming experiences delivering rollercoaster singleplayer story-driven FPS design that isn't open world. Huge budget, slick presentation, memorable stories. With very few exceptions, pretty much nobody else is delivering this. Battlefield is trying, and I thought Hardline did some neat stuff, but Call of Duty has that market locked down just like Uncharted has the Indiana Jones TPS market locked down.
The problem is that the 3 year dev cycles are hell for the studios. The horror stories about how CoD in particular gets made is very disappointing. I'd rather see Call of Duty campaigns being made by teams who have the luxury of taking 4 years if their game really needs it, instead of being forced -- like Raven was -- to stitch a half-finished Vietnam Call of Duty game into a Black Ops title in something like 18 months. Black Ops Cold War is pretty damn good, but the stiches show, and if they'd had more time they could have made a longer game. Not too long, but meatier. A fleshed out campaign takes time. And Activision refuse to give the studios time. They keep trying to squeeze blood from that lucrative multiplayer stone by pushing out a full retail Call of Duty every single year. If the campaign isn't ready, they kill it. That's what happened to Black Ops 4. The broken, money-grubbing MP side of things HAD to ship to please the shareholders, so the campaign they'd put so much work into went up in smoke. It's so cynical. And people are getting tired of being sold half-baked products designed to fill coffers like clockwork in October-November every year.