Analysis: Call of Duty Warzone’s developer has grown by nearly 50% in a year

The extent of Call of Duty Warzone developer Raven Software’s recent hiring spree has been highlighted, with VGC analysis suggesting the studio has hired over 100 staff in less than a year, with at least 40 more roles still set to be filled.

Raven’s 100+ hires since August 2020 include at least 12 producers, nearly 40 programmers and testers, over 30 artists and animators, 10 designers and more.

Notably, Raven recently hired Far Cry 6’s game director Ted Timmins as a new creative director for Warzone, Respawn’s lead animator Manuel Torres Pineda, plus William Fine, who was a senior producer on Epic Games‘ own battle royale sensation Fortnite.

The hiring figures are based on public LinkedIn profiles and suggest Raven could have grown by nearly 50% in the last 12 months, as it staffs up in an attempt to satisfy the explosive growth of Call of Duty’s free-to-play shooter.

Activision’s battle royale game has been a smash hit since its March 2020 launch, attracting six million players in 24 hours, 15 million in three days, 30 million in 10 days, 50 million in one month, 85 million in nine months, and 100 million in 13 months.

To cope with the demands of its ballooning player base, Raven – which since 2010 has acted as a support studio for every premium Call of Duty game – has been on a major recruitment drive, as it attempts to evolve into a true standalone series studio.

According to Raven’s company profile on LinkedIn, around 350 people currently list the developer as their place of employment. Analysis of these profiles shows that at least 100 of these employees (listed below) joined in the past year, which tallies with the credits for 2020’s Black Ops Cold War, which listed around 250 employees in its credits.

In 2015, a company photograph (see below) taken during celebrations for Raven’s 25th anniversary showed around 150 employees, which suggests that it could have doubled in size in six years.

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And the company is currently advertising a further 41 open positions, which could take its total number of employees to well over 400 – potentially near-tripling its staff count compared to 2015.

Creative director Amos Hodge told VGC in a Warzone interview published in April that the studio was “hiring like crazy” in response to the game’s explosive growth, but suggested that it would also continue to contribute to premium Call of Duty games.

“We have jobs posted all over the place and we’re looking for new talent,” he said. “If any of your readers out there are interested… we have more ideas than we can do!

“Warzone was a smash hit success. All the studios are helping on it, but it’s also additional to our normal Call of Duty schedule. We have a normal Call of Duty schedule and this is on top of that, so we’ve had to grow really fast.”

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During its Q1 2021 earnings call in May, publisher Activision confirmed it was planning to triple the size of “certain franchise teams” compared to their sizes in 2019. This would entail the hiring of some 2,000 developers across the entire company, during the two-year period beginning in 2020.

VGC understands that virtually every internal studio at Activision is now working on Call of Duty.

Raven has ambitious plans for Call of Duty Warzone this year. As first revealed by VGC, the studio is planning to debut an entirely new game map alongside this year’s (currently unannounced) premium franchise instalment, which will be called Call of Duty: Vanguard.

The new Warzone map will be the series’ largest and most ambitious to date, sources told VGC, and is currently planned to coincide with the release of the new premium game, rather than arriving months later like Black Ops Cold War’s Verdansk 84 did.

The list: Raven’s Warzone hiring spree

Name (previous employer) – Date hired