Activision in the context of "Call of Duty 2"

Activision Blizzard, Inc. is an American video game holding company based in Santa Monica, California. Activision Blizzard currently includes three operating units: Activision, Blizzard Entertainment and King.

Founded in July 2008 through the merger of Activision, Inc. and Vivendi Games, the company owns and operates additional subsidiary studios, as part of Activision, including Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games. Among major intellectual properties produced by Activision Blizzard are Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Guitar Hero, Skylanders, Spyro, Tony Hawk's, Diablo, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, StarCraft, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush Saga. Under Blizzard Entertainment, it invested in esports initiatives around several of its games, most notably Overwatch and Call of Duty. Activision Blizzard's titles have broken a number of release records. As of March 2018, it was the largest game company in the Americas and Europe in terms of revenue and market capitalization.

Xbox is a video gaming brand that consists of four main home video game console lines, as well as applications (video games), the streaming service Xbox Cloud Gaming, and online services such as the Xbox network and Xbox Game Pass. The brand is owned by Microsoft Gaming, a division of Microsoft.

The brand was first introduced in the United States in November 2001, with the launch of the original Xbox console. The Xbox branding was formerly, from 2012 to 2015, used as Microsoft's digital media entertainment brand replacing Zune. In 2022, Microsoft expanded its gaming business and reorganized Xbox to become part of its newly formed Microsoft Gaming division. Under Microsoft Gaming, Xbox's first-party publishers are Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media (Bethesda Softworks), and Activision Blizzard (Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, and King), who own numerous studios and successful franchises.

Call of Duty is a first-person shooter military video game series and media franchise published by Activision, starting in 2003. The games were first developed by Infinity Ward, then by Treyarch and Sledgehammer Games. Several spin-off and handheld games were made by other developers. The most recent, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, was released on November 14, 2025.

The series originally focused on a World War II setting, with Infinity Ward developing Call of Duty (2003) and Call of Duty 2 (2005) and Treyarch developing Call of Duty 3 (2006). Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) introduced a modern setting and proved to be the breakthrough title for the series, creating the Modern Warfare sub-series; a Modern Warfare remastered version was released in 2016. Two other entries, Modern Warfare 2 (2009) and Modern Warfare 3 (2011), were made. The sub-series received a reboot with Modern Warfare in 2019, Modern Warfare II in 2022, and Modern Warfare III in 2023. Infinity Ward has also developed two games outside of the Modern Warfare sub-series, Ghosts (2013) and Infinite Warfare (2016).

Microsoft Gaming is the video game and digital entertainment division of the American multinational technology company Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington and established in 2022. Its five development and publishing labels consist of: Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks (publisher of ZeniMax Media), Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, and King (the latter three are publishers of Activision Blizzard). It produces the Xbox video game consoles and services, in addition to overseeing production and sales, and is led by CEO Phil Spencer, who has overseen Xbox since 2014.

Prior to 2022, Microsoft had several different video game-related product lines, including Xbox hardware, Xbox operations, and game development studios. Microsoft Gaming was created with the announcement of Microsoft's plans to acquire Activision Blizzard to unify all of Microsoft's gaming groups within a single division. With the completion of the Activision Blizzard acquisition in 2023, Microsoft became one of the largest gaming companies, the third-by revenue and the largest by employment. The company has 500 million monthly active players across all gaming platforms.

On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The acquisition was completed on October 13, 2023, with its total cost amounting to $75.4 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft brought Activision Blizzard under its Microsoft Gaming business unit as a sibling division to Xbox Game Studios and ZeniMax Media. With it, Microsoft gained ownership of several franchises under Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, and King, including Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and Candy Crush. As of 2023, the acquisition is the largest video game acquisition by transaction value in history.

Following shareholder approval of the acquisition, the merger was reviewed by several national anti-trust bodies, with early approvals granted by the European Commission and China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), among others. The United States' Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued formal challenges to the acquisition. Sony also criticized the merger, concerned that Microsoft would make the lucrative Call of Duty franchise exclusive to the Xbox platform, though Microsoft committed to non-exclusivity through 2033. The FTC withdrew its request after courts did not find their anti-trust compelling to block the merger, while Microsoft offered to offload its cloud gaming support for Activision Blizzard's games for ten years to Ubisoft to appease the CMA.

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California, and a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. Originally founded in 1991, the company is best known for producing the highly influential massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (2004) as well as the multi million-selling video game franchises Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch. The company also operates Battle.net, an online gaming service.

Founded as Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles: Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham, and Frank Pearce. The company began development of their own software in 1993, with games like Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings, and changed its name to Chaos Studios, Inc. the same year, then to Blizzard Entertainment after being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates in 1994; that year, the company released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, which would receive numerous sequels and led to the highly popular World of Warcraft. By the end of the decade, Blizzard also found success with the action role-playing game Diablo (1997) and strategy game StarCraft (1998). The company became part of Vivendi Games in 1998, which would then merge with Activision in 2008, culminating in the inclusion of the Blizzard brand name in the title of the resulting holding company; Activision Blizzard became completely independent from Vivendi in 2013. Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023, maintaining that the company will continue to operate as a separate business, while part of the larger Microsoft Gaming division; Blizzard Entertainment retains its function as the publisher of games developed by their studios.

Vivendi Games was an American video game publisher and holding company based in Los Angeles. It was founded in 1996 as CUC Software, the publishing subsidiary of CUC International, after the latter acquired video game companies Davidson & Associates and Sierra On-Line. Between 1997 and 2001, the company switched parents and names multiple times before ending up organized under Vivendi Universal (later renamed Vivendi). On July 10, 2008, Vivendi Games merged with Activision to create Activision Blizzard.

Infinity Ward, Inc. is an American video game developer. They developed the video game Call of Duty, along with seven other installments in the Call of Duty series. Vince Zampella, Grant Collier, and Jason West established Infinity Ward in 2002 after working at 2015, Inc. previously. All of the 22 original team members of Infinity Ward came from the team that had worked on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault while at 2015, Inc. Activision helped fund Infinity Ward in its early days, buying up 30 percent of the company, before eventually fully acquiring them. The studio's first game, World War II shooter Call of Duty, was released on the PC in 2003. The day after the game was released, Activision bought the rest of Infinity Ward, signing employees to long-term contracts. Infinity Ward went on to make Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, the Modern Warfare reboot, and its sequel.

Co-founder Collier left the company in early 2009 to join parent company Activision. In 2010, West and Zampella were fired by Activision for "breaches of contract and insubordination", they soon founded a game studio called Respawn Entertainment. On May 3, 2014, Neversoft was merged into Infinity Ward.

Treyarch Corporation (/ˈtreɪɑːrk/ TRAY-ark; formerly Treyarch Invention LLC) is an American video game developer based in Los Angeles with additional studio locations in Vancouver, Canada; and Austin, Texas. Founded in 1996 by Peter Akemann and Doğan Köslü, it was acquired by Activision in 2001. The studio is known for its work for the Call of Duty series, which it develops alongside Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games, and Raven Software.