Treyarch has ‘got the online balance right’

A Call of Duty developer’s job is never done.

Once the game has shipped, the team has to manage the millions of gamers that flock to the title’s online multiplayer.

And it’s not just about DLC either, but handling the critical mass of consumers and dealing with complaints of security breaches.

After several years of producing Call of Duty games, Activision and Treyarch are confident they’ve got the balance right.
We learned a lot from World at War and Modern Warfare 2,” says Treyarch’s games design director David Vonderhaar. Everytime you do this you get a little better.

We have a partnership with an internal Activision studio called Demonware, which deals with the infrastructure side of it. These guys are professionals and do this for a living. It took us years to understand that and properly scale for it. And we are here with that now. It is very rare you can’t play Black Ops online.

On the security front, a game of this scale and popularity is always going to be a target.

We have a security team internally who go to work every day and try to cut out any breaches. And I think we have successfully demonstrated that whenever something comes up, we have a solution for it.”