Early this week, “Call of Duty” (Cod) executive producer Mark Rubin suggested something that made CoD fans upset. In an interview with OXM, Rubin stated that hardcore CoD fans were not hardcore gamers.

“It’s kind of a weird, ironic thing to say; they aren’t hardcore gamers, or even gamers, but they play Call of Duty every night,” Rubin said to OXM.

This statement would make any gamer’s blood boil no matter who the developer is or what game is the subject. But what if I told you he was right?

Rubin may have went about wording his statement in the worst way imaginable, but do not mistake his words for fallacies. The “Call of Duty” franchise is not only a juggernaut in the video game industry, but in the entire scope of the entertainment industry. Last year, “Call of Duty: Black Ops II” made $1 billion dollars in fifteen days; that is 15 million units in the hands of 15 million people. Of those 15 million people, can you say that each and everyone one of them represents the hardcore gamer?

Of course not. The video game community has grown large within the seventh console generation, but as a hobby it still remains to be a niche. The guy plopping down on the couch to play a couple of rounds of “Call of Duty: Black Ops” after work is not the guy getting excited to see new footage of “Kingdom Hearts 3” at the next video game expo.

If anything, Activision’s annual “Call of Duty” installment base (much to the annoyance of other gamers) suits him because it is the game he buys all year. He is not looking for each installment to blow out the back of his skull with a barrel locked and loaded with ground breaking innovations. He finds comfort in familiarity. To put it simply, he is not a gamer.

He does not spend a few hours a day milling around gaming sites for industry news. He did not care about Dante’s redesign for “DMC”. He probably has never even heard of “Devil May Cry”. He was not excited to hear that Shinji Makami was making his great return to the genre he fathered with The Evil Within. All he knows is that the Resident Evil film series is just ‘meh’. All of this is perfectly okay. He does not have to be a hardcore gamer to appreciate the entertainment he gets from Call of Duty, but he has to be a gamer to care to follow its development cycle and the industry politics surrounding the popular franchise. I know he doesn’t and I don’t hate him for it; he just wants me to shut up and pass the damn controller already.

So my gamer brethren, simmer down. Mark Rubin’s clumsy statement was directed towards the numerous fun loving and trendy casual folk, not us, the rabid hate machine that is the hardcore gaming community.