This slipped through our news net when we first talked about the conference call that Activision Blizzard Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick had with investors following the posting of the financial results for his company. It seems that, alongside information about Vivendi games franchises and World of Warcraft retention data, the subject of Call of Duty was brought up. And if Kotaku has it right, it appears that Bobby Kotick announced that his company is already planning to release another Call of Duty game in 2009. And no, we are not talking about Call of Duty: World at War, which should arrive by the end of 2008, we are talking about a brand new game, developed from the ground up by Infinity Ward.

The Call of Duty franchise has proved to be one of the most important revenue streams for Activision and so it plays a central role in the business plan of post merger Activision Blizzard. The prominence of the series was re-affirmed by Call of Duty 4, which abandoned the well known and overused World War II theme to take on modern warfare. The title is still high in videogame sales charts, especially on the PC, and it has a large fan base which engages in multiplayer matches.

It seemed that apart from Call of Duty: World at War, which is developed by Treyarch and takes the player on a survival action adventure in the Pacific theater, there was no other project in development related to the franchise. But it appears that Infinity Ward has been quietly doing most of the pre-production required to launch a new game at some point in 2009.

Nothing more than that the game is in development is known at the moment, but the developers might keep the modern setting for the project and, given the time frame, we expect to see it benefit from an improved version of the game engine that powered Call of Duty 4.