Call of Duty: Mobile took inspiration from Crossfire, PUBG and Free Fire and added UA spend, influencer marketing and robust live ops to achieve its monster 2019 launch.
That’s according to Activision’s mobile VP Matt Lewis, who talked through the game’s genesis and launch today at GDC.
Lewis started out by referencing the first few attempts to bring Call of Duty to mobile – first, a premium game, and later, a F2P builder-battler, Call of Duty: Heroes – which Lewis said “largely copied” the Machine Zone-made 4X games that were popular in that period.
There was also a prototype COD FPS spun up internally at King which never saw the light of day, but contained “some of the most inventive stuff I’ve ever seen”, according to Lewis.
The game that became COD: Mobile started in earnest in 2017, said Lewis, who noted that the dominant mobile shooters PUBG Mobile and Free Fire hadn’t launched back then, so “there was no market precedence for a Western-oriented mobile shooter”.
But having seen the success of Crossfire Mobile in the east, Activision decided it wanted to work with its developer, Tencent-owned Timi, to make COD: Mobile.
The first iteration of the game was a “synchronous 5v5 COD shooter”, said Lewis, which also had an asynchronous mode, because “at the time we had no idea if Western players were actually going to want to use twin stick controls…there were other shooter games on the market, but none of them had achieved scale.”
“It felt like players weren’t ready for that in this market, so we wanted to de-risk that by having something that felt like you could still progress and still be playing COD, but not need to be really good at the touch controls.”
But then with the launch of PUBG Mobile and Free Fire, Activision saw that the market could support a game closer to the core COD experience. “We thought about it as the moment-to-moment and core loop should be 80% similar to what you’re familiar with, and 20% mobile-optimised,” said Lewis.
When it came to launching the title, former Scopely exec Lewis credited UA spend, its influencer campaign and robust launch live ops as factors in the game’s success.
“There was just good execution on the table stakes of mobile game publishing…almost all the money was UA. That was important, especially in 2019,” he said. “Now, maybe it’s a little bit different with some of the changes [in the UA space]. There was the right kind of live ops to begin with…stuff that was very welcoming, very shareable.”
Activision also worked with regional publishers to lean on their local market and marketing expertise, said Lewis. His team also used some of the brand marketing and PR expertise from the wider Activision machine, he added, which is not something most mobile games can do.
When asked what he’d learned through the whole process, Lewis added: “I say this proudly – copy what works. I think a lot of times there’s a tendency to love your own ideas. And you shouldn’t not plug your own ideas, but if you look at your stuff coming out, and 80% of your roadmap is your original ideas, in my mind, you’re doing it wrong. You’re not operating with humility.”
“We have very big, large entrenched competitors who are doing super smart things…do we think if we kind of mimic what they’re doing, we have a chance to solve legitimate problems that our players are having? Just be humble and look around and see what’s working.”
