Johanna Faries, Annie Bellfield and Dean Takahashi speak at GamesBeat at The Game Awards.
Johanna Faries, Annie Bellfield and Dean Takahashi speak at GamesBeat at The Game Awards.
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Why Call of Duty is more than just a game | Johanna Faries

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 9 min

There’s no bigger game than Call of Duty. And so it was a natural for us to discuss its cultural impact at our conference GamesBeat at The Game Awards.

We were lucky to open our event with Johanna Faries, general manager of Call of Duty and senior vice president at Activision. I spoke with her and TikTok’s Annie Belfield, team lead for console and cross-platform gaming at TikTok, about how the game has maintained its cultural relevance over the past two decades.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.