Next Call of Duty will drop PS4, ending 12 years of support on the platform

It's finally happened: the next Call of Duty game will not launch on PS4. That's the word from COD publisher Activision on Twitter, who made a public statement in response to rumours that the next game would support PS4. It's been a solid 12-year run for Call of Duty on the Sony console, which kicked off in 2013 with Ghosts, included a full Modern Warfare reboot and two major iterations of Warzone, and concluded with last year's somewhat sub-par Black Ops 7.

Call of Duty's technical ambitions have no doubt been held back by the ongoing cross-generation period, with ray tracing features slowly dying out after their introduction in the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot, so this news can only be a good thing for fans on current-gen consoles and PC. The next title is expected to be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, which as late-numbered sequel doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence for a dramatic break with prior entries, but it's clear that constituent studios Treyarch and Raven Software still have an internal drive to push technical boundaries.

By dropping PS4 support, the uplift to the new baseline level of performance is substantial. While more resource-constrained current-gen systems like the Steam Deck and Switch 2 don't offer huge upgrades to raw graphics performance over PS4, they do boast much better CPUs, instant-access SSD storage and modern upscaling methods like FSR and DLSS. That makes current-gen-only development significantly easier, as your designs don't need elegant fallbacks for systems with mechanical hard drives, ancient CPUs and checkerboard rendering.

The latest COD, Black Ops 7, launched on Xbox One as well as PS4, PS5, Series X/S and PC, and we have to assume that the next Call of Duty game will also drop Xbox One as a target platform given that it has an even smaller player base than PS4.

Black Ops 7 was so poorly reviewed on launch that we didn't even cover it in a busy November that also saw the announcement of Valve's Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller, and the release of games like Kirby Air Riders, Tomb Raider Definitive Edition, Assassin's Creed Shadows (for Switch 2), Stalker 2 (for PS5), Outlaws, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment. Fan sentiment for BO7 was also mixed, with an enforced co-op campaign mode that doesn't allow you to pause even if you're playing single-player.

Thankfully, if the PS4 remains your console of choice and you have a hankering for Call of Duty, you still have plenty of options available that you have might have missed. Here's the full list: