Next Call of Duty Game Will Kick PS4 and Xbox One Players to the Curb

In an offhanded comment on the official X account for Call of Duty, developers confirmed that the next entry in the series will be exclusive to current-gen consoles and PC. The responses range from players declaring they weren't interested anyway to expressing relief that new titles won't be held back by older target platforms, and that the games looked bad on those platforms anyway. It's definitely bad news for players who simply haven't been able to afford a new console or mid-range PC, but an annual release series like Call of Duty has to be spending a lot of development time on these ports every year, so it makes sense from a developer's perspective.

Not sure where this one started, but it’s not true. The next Call of Duty is not being developed for PS4.

— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) May 4, 2026

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S released in November of 2020, but Call of Duty is only just dropping support for previous-generation platforms...nearly six years after the start of the current gen. For PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which launched in November of 2013, that's over a decade of support by the Call of Duty series, only stopping with last year's Black Ops 7. Honestly, that's very much in the higher range of time that a game series would usually have long-term support for a certain hardware target, so it's hard to criticize the move as unreasonable.

While it may indeed cost some players who could only be kept playing with last gen support, there's a common sentiment that last-gen support was hindering Call of Duty in many ways. Removing the need to create compromised versions of the game every year should at minimum give the developers more time to optimize for current platforms. As most last-gen players who actually bought those versions of the games will tell you, it's not like they looked or performed particularly well anyway.

Shifting the baseline should also make it easier for developers to implement engine-wide features like real-time ray tracing and global illumination, as well as support higher-end versions of the effects on PC, though it's unclear how tailored the engine is for current gen yet. There's also the Nintendo Switch 2 to worry about, though ports to that handheld have thus far compared favorably to Xbox Series S and base PS5 ports, albeit with limited resolution and FPS.