Both Call of Duty: Ghosts from Infinity Ward and EA’s Battlefield 4 are arriving later this year inside the same timeframe, and similar to the previous years, both the titles are expected to come out with all guns blazing to take the market. However, while this is a time when both the companies are providing finishing touches to their respective titles (basically, a ceasefire situation), one company feels that it’s high time to talk about its opponents, but not in any maligned way.
Executive producer Mark Rubin recently spoke with Gamesindustry International, where he discussed the never-ending competition between the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchise, stating that the competition is more about pushing each other in the same direction to be more successful.
"It's less antagonistic, from a developer's side - sure marketing and stuff is all [about that] but on a developer's side it's like, 'Oh, did you see that stuff they're doing? That's so cool!' We could do something that's like this and that and we get excited about seeing that kind of stuff. So from a developer's side, it definitely pushes us [to do better],” he explained.
“But it pushes us in a - I don't know if other studios feel this way - but I hope in a sort of camaraderie type sense. 'Oh, those guys are doing awesome stuff. Let's jack up our game.' But not like two opposing teams. Rather, like the same team pushing in the same direction.”
He went on to clarify that whether there is competition in the industry or not, everybody wants and loves gaming “because if gaming isn't good, then we all lose our jobs in a sense. So for us, I think that the intellectual realization is we want everyone to be successful because if gaming is successful then we're all successful."
Rubin also went on to clarify that although the Call of Duty franchise has seen a lot of sales and popularity from the fans in the recent years, there is absolutely no place or time for complacencies to creep in
"Every year, every time we made a new one it was the same thing [in terms of competition], and I like that. I think that's the part that keeps us hungry, that keeps us... we don't want to feel like the top dog, necessarily. We want to feel like it's a struggle every time. We want to feel that almost 'Rocky moment', which is kind of a weird thing to say, but we do want to feel like that,” he stressed.
“We want to feel like we've got a huge challenge in front of us. We can't just phone this in and ship a game and expect it to sell. We actually really have to do harder work this year than we did last year.”
