With every new year we gamers are graced with the presence of some pretty awesome games. Titles like Spec Ops: The Line and Max Payne 3, It’s a sweet life really. But there’s a whole demographic of people out there that never venture beyond the safety of their Madden, FIFA, NHL, NBA and more recently, Call of Duty.

You know exactly what I’m talking about, those titles that release every year and unless you are a hardcore player you don’t notice the minute changes that have been implemented. I won’t lie; I haven’t played a Madden game in years. I believe that I will have as much fun playing a $5 copy of Madden 09 as I would spending $60 on Madden 13. The same thing goes for Call of Duty; I will have just as much fun playing Call of Duty 4 as I would playing MW3.

I have enjoyed the Call of Duty series for a very long time and still have fond memories of playing hours upon hours of Call of Duty 2 for the PC. This feeling continued through Call of Duty 4 and even Modern Warfare 2, but it all started to go downhill from there. With the release of Black ops and Modern Warfare 3 I started to get sick of it all. I took a step back and realized it’s all the same crap over and over and we weren’t really getting anything really substantial that would be worth my $60. But these kids that see that “Call of Duty” title and without reading previews and reviews, go out and buy it day one. We are letting these developers continue to put in minimal work and spit out games that aren’t worth it. I’m not saying that these games that come out every year are terrible, because they aren’t. I’m saying that if these developers had more time to add new features, more maps, more unique missions, and do more testing these games would be substantially better.

These Call of Duty games are being perpetuated by bro’s, and preteens who scream their heads off over their microphones on Xbox Live. I would have said PlayStation Network, but nobody owns a microphone. If we continue to throw our money at these games we are supporting the habits of lazy developers. Now I’m not calling all of the developers lazy, but if you continue to praise and support them for doing the same things over and over you are training them to never take risks and come up with real substantial improvements.

It always seems that when a new Call of Duty game comes out it’s always a contender for Game of the Year on many different websites and television award shows like GameTrailers and G4. I feel that the people who decide the winners of the Game of the Year nominees need to take a step back and compare the most recent game to the other games in the series to really see if they have progressed and added anything of real value.

Now my proposed solution to this problem is to do take a year or two off and really work to make some big improvements. Imagine what developers with skill can do when they aren’t put into any time constraints of a yearly release. Take two or three years and really amaze us. Generally the more time you have to work on something, the end product ends up being much better and this idea would work with games. I’m not talking about completely changing the game, but giving us enough change to feel like the $60 we are dropping is worth it.

So after taking a few years off you are getting the public excited for something big, something they have never seen before, a truly complete, new, fun and polished Call of Duty Experience. The timing of this couldn’t be any better, with the new consoles incoming they have the chance to really focus on the next gen consoles and really make an awesome game experience worth talking about for years to come.

Edit: I understand the development cycle is already around 2 years because of the different developers that trade off every year, I’m talking about a larger gap in time between games.