Call Of Duty is not being released on PS4 this year confirms Activision

Activision still hasn’t announced this year’s Call Of Duty game, but it has confirmed it’s going to be current gen only.

When the PlayStation 4 launched in 2013, it made sense for that year’s Call Of Duty game, Call Of Duty: Ghosts, to release on both PlayStation 3 and 4. 2015’s Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3 was the last time the series was released on the older format, which at the time few people were surprised by or upset at.

However, the PlayStation 5 was five years old last Christmas and new Call Of Duty games were still being released on its predecessor. Which isn’t surprising, since many PlayStation 4 owners still hadn’t moved to the newer console.

However, with a recent spike in PlayStation 5 sales, Activision has finally decided to abandon the PlayStation 4, confirming that the 2026 Call Of Duty game will only be released for the current gen PlayStation console.

It’s a little odd that Activision would just randomly come out and say this, considering the game itself has not yet been announced, but the confirmation appears to be a reaction to recent rumours suggesting the game was going to stay a cross-gen title.

Over the weekend, HeyImAlyx on X, who has a track record of leaking Call Of Duty content, said he had heard that this year’s entry, widely assumed to be Modern Warfare 4, was being playtested on PlayStation 4.

This naturally led to assumptions that Modern Warfare 4 will launch on last gen consoles, only for the official Call Of Duty X account to say this is not the case.

‘Not sure where this one started, but it’s not true. The next Call Of Duty is not being developed for PlayStation 4,’ a short statement reads.

For what it’s worth, HeyImAlyx has since added that he ‘never said it was releasing there’ and Keshav Bhat, co-founder of Call Of Duty website CharlieIntel, has claimed that he too heard Modern Warfare 4 was in development for PlayStation 4 at one point but was cancelled late last year.

Whether it was ever in development or not, what this ultimately means is that Activision feels confident about moving Call Of Duty away from the PlayStation 4 without sacrificing too much of its audience.

In 2024, Sony said that of its 97 million monthly active consoles, there was a 50/50 split between PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, so the figures will have swung further in the newer console’s direction since then.

Even so, there’s still a significant PlayStation 4 userbase out there, so the move will mean a financial hit for Activision. Although they may feel that the older format is starting to hold the series back, given the superior power of the PlayStation 5.

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Activision has made no mention of the Xbox platforms, but it’d be odd for it to scrap a PlayStation 4 version of Modern Warfare 4 but still release the game for Xbox One. Although Activision is now owned by Microsoft, so it’s perhaps not best to take that for granted.

Although the move is inevitable it comes at a difficult time for Call Of Duty, after the disappointment of last year’s Black Ops 7. It was such a critical and commercial flop that Activision publicly apologised for it, promising to never release back-to-back Black Ops or Modern Warfare games again.

Last year, it was claimed that Modern Warfare 4 would also launch for the next Xbox console, now dubbed Project Helix, though that seems unlikely now as everything points to that console launching in 2027, opposite the PlayStation 6.

There also remains no sign of the Call Of Duty series making the jump to Nintendo Switch, despite that being one of Xbox’s big promises when it bought Activision.

It was rumoured in December that the first Call Of Duty Switch port would arrive ‘in a few months,’ but we’re approaching the halfway point of the year and there’s still no sign of it. If it ever does arrive it’ll almost certainly be only for the Switch 2.

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