Activision plans to 'triple the size' of some development teams by the end of 2022

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The publisher says it needs to "grow our developer base" in order to keep up with growing demand.

Call of Duty Mobile
(Image credit: Activision)

Activision didn't reveal anything new about the state of Overwatch 2 or Diablo 4 during today's quarterly earnings call, but it did tease some very big plans for the future, including more frequent game releases and an increased focus on live operations, which will require significant levels of new hires over the next couple of years.

"As we look ahead, demand for our content has never been stronger," CEO Bobby Kotick said. "We continue to ramp our investment in creative and development talent, especially with increased competition from Chinese companies and platform providers, and this will allow us to better serve our players."

"From the start of 2020 through the end of next year we intend to hire more than 2000 developers. We plan to triple the size of certain franchise teams compared to those team sizes in 2019, and we have aggressive hiring plans around the world including new studios or major expansion in Poland, China, Australia, and Canada."

Activision COO Daniel Alegre repeated that commitment in later comments, saying, "We recognize with our strategy of increasing game content and frequency, as well as doubling down on live operations, we must and we have to continue to grow our developer base."

While no specifics were given, it’s reasonable to assume that the increased focus on more frequent content releases and live services—and the people necessary to provide them—are driven primarily by the runaway success of Call of Duty: Warzone. Activision said that free-to-play and mobile have "transformed the franchise" by more than tripling the number of monthly average users across the franchise over the past two years, and driving premium sales of Black Ops – Cold War "well above" levels normally seen in the first quarter of the year.

Andy Chalk
Andy Chalk
US News Lead

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.