Warzone Raven Developer Grows Almost 50% In One Year

Activision is no joke when it comes to staffing to support Call of Duty Franchising. Raven Software, who took over development and support Call of Duty: Warzone according to Infinity Ward, is said to have hired more than 100 new employees in the last year. This analysis was done by VGC, who obtained these numbers by looking at public LinkedIn profiles to see who has updated their workplace for Raven since August 2020.

And these new hires come from many different parts of the industry. VGC notes that Raven has hired Far Cry 6 game director Ted Timmins, currently creative director for Battlefield; Manuel Torres Pineda, principal animator of the visual remake, is currently animating at Raven; and William Fine, who were senior producers on Fortnite, currently working Battlefield; among many others, including “at least 12 producers, almost 40 programmers and testers, over 30 artists and animators, 10 designers, etc”.

Raven previously filled the role of Activision support studio, having worked on every Call of Duty released since 2010. However, now, the company has stopped at the role War zone Lead developer like Activision looks set to provide ongoing support for Extremely popular free game with over 100 million players now. VGC’s hiring analysis shows the studio grew by nearly 50% last year, and notes that the studio still has 40 open roles. Filling those roles would nearly triple Raven’s size since 2015, when it had about 150 employees. It is currently around 350.

Raven will also continue to support premiums Call of Duty along with most of Activision’s other studios. The publishers are said to have basically every studio under their umbrella working on Call of Duty Franchising in some form right now. Activision itself has confirmed in its Q1 2021 earnings report that it is looking to grow Call of Duty team to the tune of an additional 2,000 people in various fields.

This year Call of Duty (reportedly called Call of Duty: Vanguard) is Developed by Sledgehammer and is expected to be released later this year, with an announcement expected to happen via a in the game Battlefield events next month at a certain point. Battlefield is expected to link to the new one Call of Duty in a big way, even bigger Verdansk ’84 makeup which we received this year. Explosive growth at development studio next iteration of Battlefield will be paramount in making that happen.

You can see Full list of new employees at Raven (and where they come from) on VGC.