Most Recent: Xbox 360

While they were riding high off the success of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2010, Activision filed a trademark application for Call of Duty: Space Warfare. The publisher let the trademark lapse last year, but with the genie out of the bottle, fans and the press have been asking about a sci-fi-tinged Call of Duty ever since.

Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin had to field another of these queries while speaking to the Metro newspaper about the recent launch of Call of Duty: Ghosts. The question is especially relevant now as Ghosts featured several missions on a space station high above the Earth. While it looks like Call of Duty: Space Warfare isn’t happening right now, Rubin wouldn’t rule it out completely:

Metro: The space levels got me thinking about all the rumours that you or Treyarch were going to do a space marine type game and this really convinced me it would work. You could play it straight, it doesn’t need to be Warhammer or have aliens even. But you could have levels with different gravity, different weapons and it would still be perfectly grounded in realism. Perhaps ironically, more so than the current games.

Rubin: Yeah. It makes sense. I wouldn’t count it out. Everything’s on the table. When we start a new game every possibility’s on the table. If we think that it’d be cool to have a battle over Jupiter, sure. Why not?

The rest of the interview is definitely worth a look as Metro’s David Jenkins spends his time hammering Rubin with more questions about “Call of Duty IN SPACE” and about the perceived graphical differences between the PS4 and Xbox One. Rubin doesn’t say anything about that, but it’s a fun read all the same.

It’s another billion dollar day for the video game industry… sort of.

Activision has announced they shipped more than $1 billion worth of copies of Call of Duty: Ghosts to retail outlets across the world for the game’s launch yesterday. The $1 billion figure doesn’t include download revenues from Ghosts, which also launched on Steam, the PSN, and the Xbox Live Store yesterday. It’s unknown how many of those copies have been sold to fans (or even how many copies “$1 billion” represents), but I’m going to guess that both numbers can be rounded up to “a lot.”

The literal pile of money that Activision is sitting on right now will only grow in the next few weeks as CEO Bobby Kotick reported that Ghosts is GameStop’s “most pre-reserved next gen title.”

Not known for his humility, Kotick also told reporters, “The [Call of Duty] franchise has never been more popular.”