While this year's Call of Duty (Modern Warfare 4) hasn't even been officially announced yet, Kotaku's Jason Schreier is reporting that 2020's entry in the long-running game series is facing a major problem.
According to Schreier's sources, Activision has recently decided to reshape the franchise’s future. First of all, the teams at Raven Software and Sledgehammer Games, the developers behind 2017's Call of Duty: WWII, are no longer solely responsible for the 2020 installment. As revealed by Schreier, next year's title was supposed to be co-led by Raven and Sledgehammer, and set during the Cold War, taking inspiration from the real-world conflict in Vietnam between the US and the National Liberation Front.
Reportedly, Activision has formally informed both studios that they are no longer in charge of the main development, with the Treyarch crew, which finished the extended works on Call of Duty IIII just last year, now prioritizing CoD: Black Ops V to hopefully fill the void created by said shake-ups. Allegedly, the drastic change was the direct result of rising tensions between Sledgehammer and Raven, "whose staff are said to have argued frequently during the past year of development on Call of Duty 2020."
From now on, those teams will support Treyarch in their effort to make Black Ops V ready for next year’s launch, which will definitely be stressful – as Treyarch's new game was originally set to debut in 2021. Thankfully, the fruits of Sledgehammer and Raven's work won't be scrapped, and will serve as the base of Black Ops V's fully fledged solo campaign – something we didn't get in Black Ops IV.
Until anything is confirmed, consider everything reported on this subject nothing more than a rumor.