Sledgehammer Games in the context of Foster City, California

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.

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).

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.