Call of Duty Studio Sledgehammer Hiring 100 Devs Over the Next Year to Work on Multiple New Games

Sledgehammer Games is bulking up in a pretty big way. A new interview with the studio's CEO claims they're going to be hiring well over a hundred new developers over the coming year.

The interview with Sledgehammer Games COO Andy Wilson comes from VentureBeat. When asked how many people Sledgehammer currently employs, Wilson replies that the studio has over 200 people working in their California and Melbourne offices combined, "and we plan to add upwards of 100 new Hammers over the next year."

You'd know Sledgehammer Games as longtime Call of Duty developers. Founded over a decade ago by Dead Space veterans Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey in 2009, the studio has developed two of their own Call of Duty games (Advanced Warfare and WW2), while assisting Infinity Ward on two others (Modern Warfare 3 and Modern Warfare).

Due to the nature of Call of Duty's development cycle, Sledgehammer has typically focused on one game at a time, but now that's changing. "We're now a multi-project studio," Wilson reveals to VentureBeat in the interview, hinting that they're moving away from their typical approach to focusing on a single Call of Duty game. But what new projects could these potentially be? Wilson isn't revealing anything right now.

Rumors have been swirling about the next Call of Duty for a while. In May 2019, it was reported that Treyarch was taking over developing a Call of Duty for 2020 from Sledgehammer. This was originally slated to be a Cold War-set Black Ops sequel, but we'll have to wait and see what the final game turns out to be.

Update: An earlier version of this story identified Wilson as CEO, rather than COO. This has been corrected.