‘Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’ Reveal Got A Lot of Hate; Activision (Not) Crying About It

  The FPS genre has dug itself into an unfortunate hole of late. A pretty freaking deep one, at that, full of poisonous frogs, Japanese fighting spiders and vials of smallpox. It’s just an uncool time all around to be a shooter, is what I’m getting at here.

Why? Because of the fans, that’s why. As we know, the Internet can be a dastardly and bastardly place, and when you’re pissed you don’t try to hide it and be all passive aggressive like you do in real life. You let your grievances fly free, safe behind your username.

When it comes to the FPS, the main issue is the whole ‘futuristic’ thing developers can’t seem to get away from. You can’t ogle footage of the new Doom, for instance, without 1000 comments crying that it looks too Halo. Call of Duty’s gone the same way of late, giving its World War roots the middle finger, and it hasn’t gone down all that well.

This is why the freshly-revealed Infinite Warfare trailer quickly became one of YouTube’s most disliked videos, and the comment section filled with grammatically questionable but sweartacular tirades. It’s all cool, though, according to Activision.

‘First of all, you gotta love the passion of gamers,’ CEO Eric Hirshberg said in response to the shitstorm. ‘This is an industry like no other and a fan base like no other. We love that our fans treat this franchise like their own and have such strong points of view about it. There just aren't many entertainment franchises on earth that can generate the kind of passion that Call of Duty can... and that's a good thing.’

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, gents.

‘Secondly, of course, we know there are people in our community who are nostalgic for the boots on the ground-style gameplay; that's why we made Modern Warfare Remastered. But we also have millions of people in our community who want to have new innovative experiences in the game each year and Infinite Warfare is going to deliver that.’  

‘The good news is this year we found a way to deliver both in one package while keeping our community together. While of course we see the passionate opinions online, we also look at other measurements and the fact is — while it's very early — pre-orders are off to a very strong start. Views of the reveal trailer ... are up and, in fact, the number of likes per view on the Infinite Warfare trailer are the highest we've ever seen.’

So there it is. A quick slice of PRtastic later, and suddenly Call of Duty in space is a good idea. Apparently.

Via Polygon.