According to respected sources, Infinity Ward will be handing over the creation of Modern Warfare 3 (which hasn't even been announced) to an as of yet unnamed development studio. Infinity Ward has avoided discussion of the project until after the successful release of Modern Warfare 2 this past November. “Right now we don’t have a clue what our next game is going to be, and we won’t know what it will be until we finish with Modern Warfare 2, which won’t be for a while,” studio frontman Rob Bowling told IGN UK last October.

It’s unclear where the third game will be made if IW really has gone AWOL from the series. Some sources have said that a Canadian studio will be taking over the development yet another has mentioned the newly formed Sledgehammer Games, headed by ex-Visceral bosses Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey. Sledgehammer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is currently recruiting for a multiplayer designer with “five years experience working on current AAA multiplayer shooters for current consoles and PC.”

Activision has only one Canadian studio, Vancouver based Radical Entertainment, the studio behind the free roaming Prototype, released in 2009. Rumors abound all over the net and elsewhere surrounding the Call of Duty franchise with some stories claiming that Treyarch is currently developing a story focused, Vietnam based episode in the series, slated for release later in 2010.

We'll let you know more as we hear it.