A new Call of Duty has come out every fall for over 20 years. While still an annual best-seller, the franchise’s cultural cachet has shifted over the last 10 years. With the rise of live-service games, Call of Duty has become its own massive silo within the wider world of online multiplayer. Where new Call of Duty releases were once treated as tech-defining showcases, they now feel more like the arrival of a new Madden or NBA 2K. Activision chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl calls this the Call of Duty tax.

“We get the coverage,” he said in a new interview with The Game Business. “But we call it the Call of Duty tax, when we’re thinking about the reviews or the reception. There’s obviously a lot of fandom around indie games and excitement around new games popping up every day on Steam. And Call of Duty’s been here for a very long time, and with that people sometimes forget that there’s so much work that goes into making these games. There’s 4,500 employees here that are trying to make the best possible experience.”

Like each new annualized sports franchise release, which often reviews poorly but sells spectacularly, Call of Duty games rarely get scored well by critics these days. Once consistently in the high 70s and low 80s on Metacritic, the shooter series is now just as likely to appear in the mid-60s, a yellow-coded range that shouts “bad game” in a landscape saturated with amazing games.

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