The Next Call of Duty Game Won’t Be Released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
- Laurent Giret
- May 05, 2026
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Last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will be the last Call of Duty game to be released on old-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Reacting to recent rumors about Activision’s cross-gen development plans, the official Call of Duty account on X posted yesterday that the next game in the series is “not being developed for the PS4.” Obviously, this implies that Xbox One players will also be out of luck.
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
Sony sold over 117 million PlayStation 4 consoles between 2013 and 2022, while the PlayStation 5 recently crossed 92.2 million units sold. Skipping old-gen consoles means that Activision will likely lose a significant amount of revenue, and this decision comes after Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 underperformed commercially.
The performance of recent Call of Duty games on PS4 and Xbox One leaves a lot to be desired, however. Competitive players are at a clear disadvantage as current-gen consoles offer a more responsive 120Hz mode, and Digital Foundry had already pointed out that the PS4 and Xbox One struggled to reach a consistent 60 FPS on 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
Activision isn’t the first publisher to drop support for old-gen consoles for a popular cross-gen game: Last year, the PS4 and Xbox One versions of PUBG: Battlegrounds were discontinued, and so was the PS4 version of Genshin Impact. “We expect to reduce ongoing crash issues through memory-related optimizations,” developer PUBG Studios said back in August.
There are still many live service games like Fortnite and Minecraft that continue to be supported on old-gen consoles, and annualized sports franchises like EA Sports FC and NBA 2K also continue to ship on Xbox One and PS4. However, it has certainly become too difficult to optimize photorealistic games like Call of Duty on hardware released back in 2013. And as it turns out, skipping old-gen hardware didn’t prevent Battlefield 6 from becoming the best-selling game of 2025.