'Be more like Larian, less like Activision': Ex-Call of Duty producer takes his old employer to task for prioritizing FOMO over quality

In an older, arguably better era of Call of Duty, Mark Rubin was its face. For 10 years he was an executive producer at Infinity Ward, overseeing Call of Duty's meteoric rise in the years after the original Modern Warfare in 2007. He was one of the guys you'd reliably see in a dev log video or on an E3 stage with controller in hand, waxing poetic about Captain Price's latest exploits, before leaving the company in 2015.

Most recently, he was an executive producer on XDefiant, Ubisoft's attempt at a free-to-play CoD alternative that the publisher shut down last year. That's all to say, Rubin's been around the CoD block, and he's not thrilled by what the series has become since his departure.

Responding to an XDefiant fan on X who mourned the short-lived shooter's shuttering and said they'd never go back to CoD, Rubin sounded off about modern game development, with fangs aimed toward his old employer.

"Thank you! A lot of games, Call of Duty included, just focus on how to make the most money possible out of the player base. They rely heavily on FOMO marketing and EOMM [engagement-optimized matchmaking] matches," Rubin wrote. "But I feel like it used to be just more about the quality of the game which would drive players to play."

Rubin seems particularly vexed by the proliferation of limited-time modes, aggressive seasonal marketing, and an obsession with player metrics that tends to supersede, in his eyes, crafting meaningful updates. He also clearly hates Call of Duty's matchmaking algorithm that prioritizes factors like time-to-match, skill level, and playlist diversity to keep players engaged longer. XDefiant famously cut against the grain by having no skill-based matchmaking, making for less predictable lobby makeups.

"That means making the game more player-centric, i.e. less engagement-based tactics and higher quality experiences for the players. Better maps, modes etc. In other words, your game should have a high player count because it's good and people want to play it rather than people playing it because the game has a $250M marketing budget," he wrote.

"Everything I just said is very simplified as it would take too long to really go into it. One last simple analogy: Be more like Larian, less like Activision."

Larian, with the gigantic success of Baldur's Gate 3, has become a symbol of game development as it ought to be: Creatively unmarred, ambitious, and profitable as a result of making a fantastic game. As one person in Rubin's replies pointed out, it's not entirely fair to point fingers at Call of Duty for FOMO when XDefiant also had live service elements like a battle pass and paid skins, to which Rubin said fair enough.

"As a free-to-play game we did have fomo content although one of the features that was coming was a way to earn a currency by just playing to buy old content. But as far as marketing we barely had any marketing budget."

He has a point. XDefiant always felt like a game extracted out of 2009, with its simplified loadout builder, modest attachments, and classic FPS playlists wrapped around the trappings of a 2020s live service product. Its back-to-basics approach was a major part of XDefiant's appeal when it first launched, and Ubisoft did win the hearts and minds of some fans who remember a time before CoD was a clown show of ugly skins.

I believe Rubin when he says there were plans to make XDefiant the purer, player-focused, less money-hungry alternative to CoD, but given Ubisoft's financial struggles due to a streak of live service failures, it was probably the wrong place and time to make that happen.