This should not come as an enormous surprise to fans of first-person shooters, but Activision is taking the Call of Duty series back to “its roots”. In a conference call to investors on Thursday, the publisher’s chief executive, Eric Hirshberg, and chief operating officer, Thomas Tippl, both acknowledged that last year’s space-based Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare had commercially underperformed. They promised that the 2017 instalment would return to “traditional combat” – a homely phrase which is likely to mean either a contemporary or historical setting.

The announcement reverses a trend toward ever more futuristic combat, which really began with the 2012 title Call of Duty: Black Ops II,partly based in a second cold war in the mid-2020s. Later, the poorly received Call of Duty: Ghosts, and the decent pair Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, wandered further into a speculative universe of drone warfare, mass electronic disruption and outer space dog fights. This trend was always questioned by hardcore fans of the series – which began in 2003 as a second world war drama – and was only going to become more obscure as studios faced coming up with ever more outlandish technological weaponry. Continuing along this narrative route for a few years we faced the prospect of holographic soldiers shooting each other with mind lasers – or even worse, a diplomatic solution.

Of course, the decision to return to the franchise’s roots won’t be a direct response to the lower than expected sales of Infinite Warfare (down almost 50% on 2015’s Black Ops III). Each title in the series now has a three-year development period, so this year’s team, San Francisco-based studio Sledgehammer, will have been well into development by the time fans started expressing contempt for Infinite Warfare’s setting. However, it’s likely Activision will have had an inkling they were losing fans after Ghosts, and when EA announced its first world war based Battlefield 1 to a frenziedly positive reception, that must have been the final nail in the space-age coffin lid.

So where is the series going? The first Call of Duty title that Sledgehammer worked on was Modern Warfare 3, which had a near-future setting in line with the rest of the Modern Warfare titles. However, Tippl’s wording was, “In 2017, Activision will take Call of Duty back to its roots and traditional combat will once again take centre stage” – and the roots of Call of Duty are in the Second World War. This is where the first three titles were set, as well as Treyarch’s Modern Warfare follow-up, World at War. The success of Battlefield 1, which is estimated to have sold around 15m copies, may well point toward the 20th century.

Also interesting from the conference call is the fact that 2015’s Black Ops III is still performing well, especially in terms of digital microtransactions: Activision made $3.8bn (£3.05bn) from in-game purchases of items and weapons last year. Whatever era the next Call of Duty is set in, we can certainly expect more use of this controversial revenue stream. This is one 21st-century innovation that isn’t going anywhere.