The Tool Desk
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Why Sledgehammer began expanding
Sledgehammer Games was founded in 2009. In a 2021 GamesBeat interview, studio leaders described a stretch of departures and rebuilding after Call of Duty: WWII (2017), alongside changes in the studio’s responsibilities. Aaron Halon became studio head in February 2018, according to GamesBeat’s account, and the team began rebuilding and recruiting as Sledgehammer shifted toward leading Vanguard. This is reported chronology, not an audited employment record.
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Halon framed the effort as looking beyond the studio’s past: “We love our legacy and what we’ve created, but we also wanted to think about the future of the studio and how we could set ourselves up to be even stronger.” He and COO Andy Wilson described planning for “Decade Two” around the studio’s tenth anniversary. Wilson dated that effort to August 2019 and said leaders considered where they wanted the studio to be in two or three years, including developing Melbourne into a full-fledged studio.
How the expansion spread across locations
The expansion was not simply a larger hiring push in one city. Sledgehammer developed a network of teams in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, with each new location at a different stage during the run-up to Vanguard.
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- Rise on every front Dogfight over the Pacific, airdrop over France, defend Stalingrad with a sniper's precision and blast through advancing forces in North Africa
- Through a deeply engaging single player Campaign a select group of soldiers from different countries rise to meet the world's gravest threat
- Call of Duty Vanguard will also usher in a new and unparalleled Call of Duty Warzone integration post launch
- Some features may require an internet connection and an online subscription
| Location | What the sources establish |
|---|---|
| Melbourne, Australia | Built from an existing engineering group, with a longer-term plan to grow it into a full-fledged development studio, as Wilson described to GamesBeat in 2021. |
| Toronto, Canada | Started in spring 2021. At the time of the GamesBeat interview, Wilson said it had just over ten people; this is a dated snapshot, not a current headcount. |
| Guildford, United Kingdom | Announced on October 14, 2021, with hiring planned. Sledgehammer said the team would work with the Bay Area, Melbourne and Toronto on Vanguard live seasons and future projects in its Guildford announcement. |
The Guildford announcement identified the area’s established game-development community as a reason for choosing it. Liz Wyle, the location’s general manager, said: “Guildford has a long history of video game development, and as a result, there’s a lot of top-tier talent and an existing game dev community there and in the surrounding towns.”
Why use multiple cities?
Wilson’s explanation was about finding skilled people where they already lived, rather than relying only on one local labor pool. “You have to go find the talent rather than expect them to come to you,” he told GamesBeat. He also said a distributed organization could bring broader perspectives to the studio. Those comments establish leadership’s intent; the available announcements do not quantify whether the strategy changed hiring outcomes, game quality or productivity.
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GamesBeat reported that Sledgehammer was closing in on 500 employees in 2021. It also recounted an estimate that about 100 of 300 developers had left during the earlier upheaval. Those are contemporaneous reported approximations, not audited staff totals, and neither should be read as the studio’s present-day size. The official Guildford announcement confirmed the locations but gave no staff figures.
What “led by Sledgehammer” meant on Vanguard
Sledgehammer was the lead developer of Call of Duty: Vanguard, but it did not make every mode or connected component alone. Activision’s November 5, 2021 launch announcement credits Treyarch with Zombies development and Raven Software with leading Warzone development. Beenox, Demonware, High Moon Studios, Activision Shanghai Studio and Toys for Bob also provided development support across Vanguard and Warzone.
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- Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 introduces fans to a dramatic single-player campaign where the stakes are at their highest, deep inside enemy territory
- Players take on the role of Reaper, contract sniper assassin, operating in the heart of a lawless region of the Middle East along the Lebanese and Syrian borders
- Tasked with a seemingly impossible mission - to topple an insidious criminal syndicate and bring them to justice
- For the first time, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 delivers precision long-range shooting campaign with targets over 1,000 meters away
- Developed by the same studio behind the highly celebrated original Contracts, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 pushes boundaries with the most realistic and challenging experience that the studio has ever created
The game launched worldwide on November 5, 2021, for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC via Battle.net, according to Activision. A Call of Duty campaign feature published in 2021 said Sledgehammer was working across the United States, Canada and Australia during development. That distributed production context helps explain why expansion mattered to the studio’s operations, but it does not establish that every location worked on every part of the game.
How the studio described Vanguard’s campaign
The developers presented the campaign as a broader view of World War II than a story limited to one front. Campaign Creative Director David Swenson described battles across “the snowy landscapes of Stalingrad, over the Solomon Islands in the Pacific, and in North Africa.” Narrative Lead Stephen Rhodes said the team wanted to use a familiar period of video-game history as a springboard for distinctive stories. Associate Narrative Designer Belinda Garcia emphasized showing that “the war was fought everywhere.” These are the creators’ descriptions of the campaign’s aims and settings, not independent historical verification. The remarks appear in Call of Duty’s 2021 campaign feature.
Rank #4
- Rise on every front Dogfight over the Pacific, airdrop over France, defend Stalingrad with a sniper's precision and blast through advancing forces in North Africa
- Through a deeply engaging single player Campaign a select group of soldiers from different countries rise to meet the world's gravest threat
- Call of Duty Vanguard will also usher in a new and unparalleled Call of Duty Warzone integration post launch
- Some features may require an internet connection and an online subscription
What the expansion story does—and does not—show
The clearest evidence is a sequence of leadership plans, dated location developments and publisher credits: Sledgehammer set a second-decade direction, expanded from Melbourne to Toronto and Guildford, and led Vanguard within a larger group of contributing studios. The sources document the rationale and structure, but do not provide an independent measure of the expansion’s impact or establish the studio’s current size and location status.
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- Some features may require an internet connection and an online subscription
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