Calling the Elite

By Rob Fahey Published 4 June, 2011

The underwhelming nature of Call of Duty Elite disguises an experiment that could define Activision's future.

Published as part of our sister-site GamesIndustry.biz's widely-read weekly newsletter, the GamesIndustry.biz Editorial, is a weekly dissection of an issue weighing on the minds of the people at the top of the games business. It appears on Eurogamer after it goes out to GI.biz newsletter subscribers.

Activision is a company built around two pillars. The first is World of Warcraft, a product which generates annual billion-dollar revenues from solid, predictable monthly subscriptions. The second is Call of Duty, a franchise whose billion-dollar credentials come from a monolithic boxed product launch just ahead of the holiday season each winter.

Everything else Activision does, to borrow an expression from Steve Jobs, is really just a hobby. Jobs was talking about Apple's underwhelming AppleTV product, but the term applies well to Activision's other titles. Some of them are pretty successful hobbies, like Blizzard's other franchises, but compared to the two brands that hold the company together, they're small fry.

Activision has announced something that's almost breathtaking in its inoffensiveness

As such, I'd imagine that Activision executives are plagued by one recurring nightmare - or at least, that they ought to be. What if one of the pillars cracks? What happens if one of those products falters - if the enormous figures generated by one of those beasts suddenly disappear from the publisher's bottom line? In a market as fickle as videogames, even splitting all your eggs between two baskets looks pretty overconfident.

If this does happen, though, it's unlikely to be World of Warcraft that suffers. Blizzard's genre-dominating behemoth may no longer be posting major growth figures (a problem in itself, in some regards, since the stock markets to which Activision is ultimately beholden are far more concerned with growth than with solid ongoing revenues) but it's certainly not in decline either. Its players have made a firm financial commitment, the kind which is hard to elicit in the first place but which, once obtained, tends to translate into immense loyalty to the game - a clear factor among a lot of WoW's player base, and indeed MMO player bases in general.

Call of Duty, on the other hand, is a lot more fragile. Where WoW players need to make a firm decision to stop paying for the game, CoD relies upon players making a firm decision each year to spend £40 on the latest version. The pressure this places on the brand is obvious - you're only ever as good as your last game, and one weak instalment, one year of bad word-of-mouth and negative consumer sentiment, and the following year's game could experience a slump that no amount of marketing dollars would ever fix.

There are two ways in which Activision can insure itself against such an eventuality. The first is to build more pillars - developing more IP of equal commercial potential to its present blockbusters. With the recent demise or "resting" of the Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk franchises, that's never been a more pressing need. The firm's partnership with Bungie is the most likely source of such an IP in the coming years, although it would be unwise to chalk that up as a sure thing - bear in mind that the last studio to go from working on a massive Microsoft IP to developing new IP for Activision was Bizarre Creations, and we all know how that ended.

The second form of insurance, then, would be to gradually steer CoD away from the risky business model it presently uses, and towards the much more reliable and stable model WoW uses. From a high-level business perspective, nothing makes more sense - or looks more attractive - than this idea. At a more realistic and detailed level, however, it's a concept fraught with problems, not the least of which is that the game's most vocal fans seem to loathe the idea.

The concept of a subscription version of Call of Duty was first mooted many months ago, and rumours about such a service were floating around until Activision announced details of Call of Duty Elite this week. It's fairly easy to see why the plans ultimately announced aren't remotely as wide-reaching or game-changing (literally) as those suggested by analysts and insiders up until now - quite simply, the reaction to those more radical plans has been hugely negative.

Instead, Activision has announced something that's almost breathtaking in its inoffensiveness. Call of Duty Elite's subscription service hasn't been entirely decided just yet, but it'll basically offer free content updates and an extra tier of statistics and community features of some description, for a small price. It's a service seemingly aimed solely at CoD's most ardent devotees, and with Activision promising that nothing on offer will provide an in-game advantage, those outside that band will have no reason to complain.

Call of Duty is a relatively fragile franchise - and fundamental changes to the business model count as a pretty serious kick in the shins for even the most robust of franchises

All of which is laudable, but equally, all of which probably means that Elite's impact on CoD's bottom line is going to be absolutely minimal. Which begs the question - why is Activision, a company which is totally clear about its intention to deal only with hugely profitable products, and totally ruthless in its implementation of that policy, bothering with this at all? Indeed, not just "bothering" - the company made a major song and dance about the unveiling, even securing mainstream newspaper coverage for the launch (much to the annoyance of the embargo-restricted specialist press).

There can only really be one answer - Activision sees this as the beginning of something much, much bigger. The company recognises that turning around a franchise like CoD is like turning an oil tanker - you can't just swing it around in the water, but must begin with a series of small, gradual course corrections. With Elite, it's testing just what percentage of CoD's player base see themselves as hardcore enough to want this kind of service - and furthermore, what percentage of those are actually willing to make a monthly financial commitment for it.

The results of this experiment will be fascinating. Those of us who are deeply engaged with gaming tend to live in something of a bubble, or an echo-chamber, and one of the possible false beliefs that may result from that is a belief that online gaming is far more important than it actually is. Specifically in the case of CoD, there's a tendency to see the game as primarily a multiplayer experience, with the singleplayer being something that people turn on in frustration when their broadband is playing up. However, there is certainly also an audience out there for whom CoD is a £40 annual investment for a 10 hour singleplayer game, with multiplayer as an added bonus only.

What is the ratio between those audiences? Online player figures (and CoD's are unquestionably huge) give us some idea, but it's really impossible to know. Equally, how many of the millions who play CoD online would be willing to pay for it, and how many would take off to other FPS franchises if asked to do so? Also impossible to tell - but CoD Elite may finally give Activision some insight into that question.

As to the future - while the innocuous nature of CoD Elite has calmed fears of CoD moving to a subscription model any time soon, I don't doubt that this remains something Activision would dearly love to do. The cautious approach, however, makes sense. After all, this whole effort stems from the basic fact that CoD is a relatively fragile franchise - and fundamental changes to the business model count as a pretty serious kick in the shins for even the most robust of franchises. It's a Catch-22 situation in a sense; to make CoD more robust, Activision may first have to risk seriously damaging it. What we're seeing right now is an attempt to reduce that risk. The softly-softly approach isn't normally in Activision's playbook - it's a company much happier being aggressive - but in this instance, it's the only way forward.

If you work in the games industry and want more views, and up-to-date news relevant to your business, read our sister website GamesIndustry.biz, where you can find this weekly editorial column as soon as it is posted.

Picture of Rob.

About Rob Fahey

Rob Fahey is a former editor of GamesIndustry.biz who spent several years living in Japan and probably still has a mint condition Dreamcast Samba de Amigo set.

Read more articles from Rob by visiting the Rob Fahey archive page.

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Comments (70) Latest comment 12 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • coolbritannia #1 12 months ago

    First! Cunts!

    /Spartacunt.

  • berelain #2 12 months ago

    Correction:

    "CoD relies upon players making a firm decision each year to spend £40 on the latest version"

    I think you find Activision expects players to pay £55 a year for the latest version. Shops might discount it, but the £54.99 is the price Activision thinks CoD is worth. The world, disappointingly, seems to agree.

  • coolbritannia #3 12 months ago

    Yeah, i got suckered, paid £45 for Black Ops 5 days before release. Never again.

  • ocmerius #4 12 months ago

    "but it'll basically offer free content updates and an extra tier of statistics and community features of some description, for a small price."

    If you pay a small price, it's NOT free
    Edited by ocmerius at 04/06/11 @ 11:21

  • CamberGreber #5 12 months ago

    Don't do COD fans. Don't Sign Up.

    There are other games out there.

    I don't understand how Online Gamers can sit around playing the same game in the same Genre everyday.
    How Boring. Variety is the spice of life.

  • Inmediasress #6 12 months ago

    I'd love to see COD sink like the Titanic but unfortunately too many fanboys around for that:(
    Worst case scenario the future of gaming will be entirely sub based probably even for Sp games so that you can post directly your scores or whatever to fuckbook.

  • ubergine #7 12 months ago

    Seems pretty obvious that this is the first step towards a disc-less, subscription only future for CoD multiplayer, and single-player special events, possibly not even yearly. If digital delivery to consoles reaches a kind of peak of market reliabililty (eg a large enough installed base of people willing to download an entire game) they may even release CoD's single player in monthly episodes over an entire year, and your monthly subscription will include the next level and new maps.

    The only way to implement such a profound change though would be by chipping a bit away at a time from the current model. The majority of the current market would I expect prefer the idea of being able to dump CoD the minute its yearly ejaculate turns rancid, whereas a constant-income model would make it harder to give up and given Activision a steady income instead of a once a year fiduciary orgasm.

    I think they're pulling themselves but I can't underestimate what people will pay for.

  • Daeltaja #8 12 months ago

    Well the last I've heard from my WoW sources, is that numbers are drastically dwindling. Once busy, progressive guild packed servers are now ghost towns and practically all of my long-term WoW buddies have quit.

    Not sure how much steam WoW has left to be honest. I think people are finally getting a little tired with it. One of those pillars will collapse sooner than Acti think, but I actually think that COD might be the one to suffer first, as Rob says.
    Being as risk-adverse as Acti are, they don't seem to be nuturing any other potential IP's, which of course is a astronomical mistake and being in the position they are, you'd think that they were carefully planting seeds across a range of new IP's, trying to find an eventual and inevitable replacement for CoD.

    Blizzard are Blizzard and they'll be fine, no matter what. But I can't shake the feeling that one day we'll all be posting here all saying the same thing. "Oh how the mighty have fallen."

  • Daddy-Doom-Bar #9 12 months ago

    Boring article. Get a job, Rob. You lost me on the second sentence.

  • darkmorgado #10 12 months ago

    Yes, I'm sure Eurogamer singlehandedly select what content to publish based on a single user's limited interests.

    Stop trolling.

  • Inmediasress #11 12 months ago

    @Daeltaja
    I await the day when blizzard and acti ar knocked of their high horse.
    I think WOW will suffer also in the near future though probably Blizz have the most vocal and fanatic fanboys and of course most numerous of them all. With the exception of the general xbox/ps/pc fanboys. I think Blizz will suffer when they release their new MMO. Because they have proven in the space of 10 years or more even that they are incapable of doing anything that is different than their older franchises.
    SC2 basically is SC with a new look (I deliberately don't use updated graphics) Diablo3 as far as I can tell is a strange mixture of diablo2 and wow and some generic fantasy game.
    No doubt people will buy it like candy but the novelty slowly evaporates around Blizzard. When the new MMO turns out to be wow2.0 people willl start to question them though there is still the matter of the large fanboy group and I think Blizz will move on the console market.
    Diablo 3 is sure to come for consoles and I think their next gen games will probably be all multipalt form the start. Since I don't think they can repeat their WOWmilking succes on the PC alone.
    I don't even understand what keeps poeple playing WOW or COD both of them are as stale as they can get.
    Edited by Inmediasress at 04/06/11 @ 12:08

  • patchbox360 #12 12 months ago

    nice article

  • insincere_dave #13 12 months ago

    I'm one of these people who buys the game cheap from a supermarket, plays through the single player and a few hours of online before selling it on for a profit to some muppet on eBay. I do not believe I am in the target demographic for Elite.

  • MrLovePump #14 12 months ago

    The best thing they could do for the game is make the dev cycles longer and release quality but less. Unfortunayly acti see games a
    s business not art. I guss they are the mcdonalds of the industry. Ill take a stake please.

  • disappointed #15 12 months ago

    I think Elite is more about creating brand lock-in. If the next CoD is overshadowed by, say, a far superior Battlefield game, what's to stop the CoD faithful jumping ship? Currently nothing. But introduce a persistent community and you give people something to lose. They don't need to monetise Elite at all in order for it to work. It's just there to get people to put in that pre-order every year.

    I agree though, that it's an experiment. It'll be interesting to see if Elite garners enough regular users to be effective, or if its appeal is limited to the core, in which case they will want to monetise the service.

  • Olemak #16 12 months ago

    Here is a "good" feature: paying elitists can transfer rank, perks and unlocked weapons between games. Non-paying noobs start from scratch every year. Worth it? Yes. Risky? He'll yeah, but not more that continuing to spam sub-par games like blops.

  • coolbritannia #17 12 months ago

    "Yes. Risky? He'll yeah, but not more that continuing to spam sub-par games like blops."

    Spot the iPhone user. "He'll" annoys the fuck out of me when I'm typing too.

  • coolbritannia #18 12 months ago

    Back to the article, I'm not trying to piss Rob off here but these articles are increasingly a weekly exercise into stating the obvious.

    Not that he reads the comments mind, cause we're all cunts.

  • Soton4084 #19 12 months ago

    Good article. I will not be buying the next Call of Duty game and will probably get Battlefield 3 (if it is good). I purchased Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops because they were cheap in the supermarkets, but neither progressed the series. I got bored of Blacks Ops very quickly before trading it in and the engine is really showing its age. Whilst I think it is inevitable that the next Call of Duty will sell bucketloads, the power of recommendation should not be underestimated. If Battlefield 3 is good then it will not take long for COD fans to jump ship and I think this will massively damage the sales of any future COD game which tries to use the SAME outdated engine...

  • witchdrash #20 12 months ago

    I'm not a big fan of COD recently, Acti have got really lazy with it, and this does just feel like the start of a money grab, however if people want to pay it, let them, since I'm not even playing the game any more (Black Ops was frankly horrible) it's not a particularly big deal.

    I think the game breaker would be pay to get extra benefit in game, if that's the case, hopefully they'll drop the pretense that the box is worth the money they charge, ditch of the single player campaign, which is also simply tacked on these days to justify the price tag, and is universally awful, and just release COD the multiplayer game £10 a month.

  • Ror1984 #21 12 months ago

    "However, there is certainly also an audience out there for whom CoD is a £40 annual investment for a 10 hour singleplayer game..."

    Erm...

  • Dannyboy1100 #22 12 months ago

    And it only costs more than xbox live!

    What a deal!!

  • themerlin13 #23 12 months ago

    I think we already see the other brands following and it's bad news for everyone, but even worse for us core gamers.

  • GozuTennai #24 12 months ago

    Gonna pirate mw3. I will not give them my money.

  • busboy33 #25 12 months ago

    So I'm not paying for any sort of gaming, but rather for more detailed statistics?

    Even if you took the current stats packages out of the retail game, I'm not going to f**king pay you to get them back. While knowing that I have a 5.3942% headshot ratio with the FAMAS is interesting, it ain't "Shut Up And Take My Money!" interesting.

    This is what happens when game design decisions are made by accountants in the boardroom. Who wouldn't pay for spreadsheets?!? I bet we can even charge a little more for downloadable Excel format! People playing wargames just love them some data collection! It just screams n00b pwnage!

  • thedaveeyres #26 12 months ago

    Nurse, 20cc's of froth, stat!

  • bdaggers #27 12 months ago

    'Kick in the shins' twice ?

    Why are these articles so badly edited ?

    Does anyone read them ?

    Why are these articles so badly edited ?

    Does anyone read them ?

  • Bluetooth #28 12 months ago

    Cheap at twice the price!

  • FortysixterUK #29 12 months ago

    I still think single player is where the games market is at, always has been and always will be.
    I do know people who only buy the Cods and Halos of this world just to go multiplayer, and never look at the single player stuff, but frankly, multi player is a distant second interest in video gaming.

    My MMO subs have been niggling me for the best part of a year. I let my AOC subs drop, only to then be offered the most amazing comeback deal ( 17 months for the price of 5 plus lots of in game gear ) . I played it for a few months, but went back to wow when Cata hit, only to burn out by the end of Dec 2010. Unfortunately, so convinced was I of Cata that I bought a 6 month sub. I stopped playing wow at the end of Feb this year and cancelled the sub. It runs out in June sometime.

    I though Rift was the way forwards....it's good, but I was wrong, my interest waned within a month. Same with DCUO.

    So , I thought about it, all the Multiplayer shooters, all the MMOs....what was putting me off them ?

    I came to a conclusion. OWNERSHIP.

    Anything you do online , for the most part, is rented. You can't play the same characters/toons offline , or even at all, in most cases.
    So I can't save my character to a memory stick or a hard drive. So I don't ever "own" that character or the work I put in.
    I just rent it.
    I can't level my character offline then take it online and enjoy the spoils of my hours of hard work or grinding.
    If I turn the offline element of many games off, I simply lose access to that character and all the time I put into it.

    So I simply stopped doing multiplayer about a month after Rift launched and haven't looked back.

    One game got it right years ago, Phantasy Star Online....but that got hacked to buggery. If a company could find a way to stop offline hacking, let you play the toon online or offline, and retain the characters save, I would be straight there, as the element of ownership would be put back into multiplayer for me.

    Until then, multiplayer as I said, is a distant second interest when compared to the wonders of single play games.

    Since I stopped multiplayer gaming, I have completed :- Gothic 4, Two Worlds 2, Star Wars unleashed 1 & 2, Dragon age and all dlc except awakening, and mass effect 1 and 2.

    All rewarding single player experiences. Long live single player, an intelligent way to stay the heck away from pathetic MMO elitism and chav ratbags in Halo and Cod. Oh, and I still have all the game saves !

  • sjmlondon #30 12 months ago

    Just a gut feeling Activision, but, I like most of my Xbox friends have pre-ordered Battlefield 3 and can't wait for it to arrive.

    I don't hear the same sort of enthusiam for MW3, and the general concensious it is that it'll be the same old same old and if we bother at all, it will be only once we see who's doing a deal on release. You could say it is now the 'Tony Hawks' of FP Shooters, tired and in desperate need of a new game engine, not just rejigged perks.

    You can also shove the MW3 Elite subscription service where the sun don't shine.

    Have a nice day


    PS: I am Spartacus
    Edited by sjmlondon at 04/06/11 @ 17:23

  • Jonny5Alive7 #31 12 months ago

    If they weren't going to bring out a new version every year and all content updates were free and regular ala WOW then that would be acceptable i think. However i doubt Activision would ever not bring out a new version every year and not charge for it.

  • TheGuvernor #32 12 months ago


    If people, including the journalist, can't see this as Activision's initial move to monetize the online fps genre then they truly have their heads up their collective arses.

  • Rens11 #33 12 months ago

    We all know what's going to happen the elite will start small maybe map packs a week early double xp things like that that don't really affect the main game but over time they will start restricting the main game giving elite dlc maps only available with elite extra perks guns etc until the only worthwhile purchase will be subscription based ala world of Warcraft whereby the game is unplayable without a subscription!

  • kongzi #34 12 months ago

    It will fail miserably. What activision is doing is basically asset-stripping. It's when the financial market takes over an industry, sells off everything that doesn't make an immediate profit, settles on one or two euphemistically called "core businesses" milks them for all it's worth before folding those as well and finally dissolving itself. Sounds familiar?

    Activision has settled on making a lot of money this console generation. I don't think there are any serious plans beyond that, desite all the pr-talk. Note how the 'innovation' is not about new products (games) but about finding new ways to make money of existing ones ('adding value for the consumer'). This at time when you see other publishers and developers putting strategies in place already aimed at the coming generations of tech, engines that can scale up, IP reboots, strategic partnerships with platform holders and major tech-companies. Activision? None of that.. just talk about monetizing CoD and WoW more efficiently. Remember how Tony Hawk was also a pillar franchise for them? Do you want to buy my TH:Ride board, I have no use for it? Yeah? I thought so....

    It's

  • Sevens #35 12 months ago

    All hail DLC, online services (welcome, EA's Origin) and stupid customers.
    Edited by Sevens at 04/06/11 @ 21:14

  • Lord_Gremlin #36 12 months ago

    They could have made Singularity their third cash cow. Game is brilliant, on par with Bioshock, Half-Life, L4D. But they blew up the opportunity.

  • clockworkzombie #37 12 months ago

    I would pay a small fee each month for dedicated servers and end the nuisance lag.

  • Kashmir774 #38 12 months ago

    When has a Call of Duty game ever had anything close to a 10- hour campaign? If you add two of any of their recent campaigns together, you'll end up at ten hours once done with both.

  • TheGuvernor #39 12 months ago

    This move by Activision is designed with shareholders NOT gamers in mind.
    It is the first move in an attempt to redefine how fps multiplayer games are supported.
    Your $60 will no longer be the price of entry. Just a down payment.
    I bet Activision are far more interested in how other developers react to 'elite' rather than their customers.
    They'd love to get the ball rolling for online subscriptions to play mulitplayer fps games.
    Resist.

  • Inmediasress #40 12 months ago

    @beemoh
    I wager the complete opposite. They probably only watch x-factor or some soap operas either of them is visual torture for me.

  • man.the.king #41 12 months ago

    @Daddy-Doom-Bar

    "Boring article. Get a job, Rob. You lost me on the second sentence. "

    If two sentences constitutes the limit of your attention span, I suggest you return to your nursery rhymes, or sing 'A B C D' again.

    Or put COD back in your console.
    Edited by man.the.king at 05/06/11 @ 09:32

  • xTakk #42 12 months ago

    one thing that wasn't mentioned in this article is the new premium service which Activision-Blizzard announced will be coming to World of Warcraft sometime soon.

  • coolbritannia #43 12 months ago

    "If two sentences constitutes the limit of your attention span, I suggest you return to your nursery rhymes, or sing 'A B C D' again. "

    Crappest putdown of the year so far.

  • jefranklin18 #44 12 months ago

    I know plenty of casual COD players that have no interest in online multiplayer; in fact I would say 100% of those I know have no interest in playing against abusive American teenagers. They also have no brand loyalty and are all looking forward to Battlefield 3, so if this indeed representative of the COD demographic, Acti are on the cusp of a huge mistake.

    *Fingers crossed* ;)

  • a8a #45 12 months ago

    @xTakk

    Probably because the only reference to this by Blizzard themselves so far is one sentence:
    "It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service."
    It hardly amounts to an announcement. There are already "premium" services which aren't included in your monthly subscription, such as the remote app. While I am a bit worried about the direction they are taking financially, they have clearly made the decision that these features would not have been developed if they could not recoup the costs directly (and in the case of the cross-realm party system, presumably offset a certain amount of money they would otherwise expect to get from realm transfers).

  • Lemming81 #46 12 months ago

    Am I missing something? What 'risky business model' are Activision currently using for CoD that you seem to agree (from the tone of your article) needs changing, Rob? They make the game (CoD25 or whatever) and people buy the game. How is this model flawed and why do they need to change it?

  • a8a #47 12 months ago

    @Lemming81

    At a guess, for the same reason that they don't make Guitar Hero games anymore.

    They pushed it too far and burned the series out with too much yearly iteration and not enough innovation. The same WILL happen with CoD at this rate.

  • captain_saturn #48 12 months ago

    I for one, as a gamer who doesn't play cod, will not actually rejoice at it's demise. CoD, as a massive seller drags the rest of gaming into the mainstream. Unfortunately, it also drags the rest of the gaming industry creatively in it's wake. Moving to a sub-based payment model would be a great decision but as with almost all MMOs people will only pay so much for so long, from what I hear WoW is actually starting to decline, which I wouldn't have expected at least for another year, given Cataclysm's release. Activision are actually employing a high risk strategy, putting all their eggs in two baskets, and I cannot fathom why they would ditch bizarre creations when pretty much everyone can see that they have built their houses among the sands of the fickle mainstream CoD fanbase. Basically, they need new IPs.

  • Dizzy #49 12 months ago

    CoD going to a pure subscription model would mean instant death for the brand unless they give away the main game for basically free.

    "I don't understand how Online Gamers can sit around playing the same game in the same Genre everyday. "

    PC gamers played CS for 10 years non-stop.
    Edited by Dizzy at 05/06/11 @ 14:05

  • metalangel #50 12 months ago

    The problem as I see it is they can't not burn it out. All the white cunts playing CoD are obsessed and just want more of the same, Activision can't change much or risk pissing them off.

    However, and this will sound familiar to most of you, there is a sudden and very abrupt transition: you're obsessed with a game, you play it all day, you think about it when not playing, it's all you want to do from sunrise to sunset. Then one day, you're not interested any more, it is suddenly too familiar, doesn't engage you any more. This is inevitable both for individual CoD fans and for the CoD playerbase on the whole.

    This might well be overdue for CoD. Activision seen to know it, and they're terrified.

  • monty2k #51 12 months ago

    @metalangel: "all the white cunts playing CoD"

    A CoD-obsessed cunt is a CoD-obsessed cunt regardless of their ethnic origin. I don't think you needed to bring race into this.
    Edited by monty2k at 05/06/11 @ 15:36

  • metalangel #52 12 months ago

    @monty2k: you forget that according to the author of this article, we (EG readers) are all white cunts.

  • geordiek #53 12 months ago

    Why don't Activision just offer us a monthly subscription to go away and never make a COD again.
    Make it so.

  • jablonski #54 12 months ago

    Another crap, redundant and under-researched article by this so-called professional writer.
    Dump this amateur EG

  • superbeast2010 #55 12 months ago

    Post deleted at 10:57:39 01-02-2012

  • a8a #56 12 months ago

    @metalangel

    Can you guys not give it a rest already? Or at the very least, get your facts straight? He referred to those espousing the idea that sexism is fine because "it would be ok if it was a guy" as cunts, very specifically. Probably not a stance I would have taken, but hey. He did not call all EG readers cunts. The childish nonsense in the comments threads on these articles since then is getting tiresome.

  • coolbritannia #57 12 months ago

    Check your facts. He called us all cunts.

  • Svecke #58 12 months ago

    @Lord_Gremlin,

    Thanks, now I know I'm not the only one thinking this.

  • anomagnus #59 12 months ago

    Good article, the only thing i disagree with is WoW remaining secure. I think WoW is now in a plateau stage, which will only result in a decline over time. The game is becoming so stale, and so narrow in its focus that it is hitting a creative wall. I think Blizzard recognize this as well.

    When they launch their new MMO, i expect it to cannabilze WoWs player base, taking the most active players. I really can't see the majority of the casual player base switching MMOs, resulting in the new MMO taking more and more of the regular players, and leaving WoW to go fallow over time.

    The thing is though, i don't see blizzard bottling lightning twice. The MMO wont be as sucessful as WoW, and the days of an 11 eleven million subscirber base will be seen as a glory day long past.

    This isn't out of spite either. I enjoyed my time in WoW, and i miss it sometimes (though i'll admit i found cata to be very stale), jsut what i see happening.

  • reeferchief #60 12 months ago

    More reasons for me never to buy a call of duty game.

  • levitate #61 12 months ago

    I think I played one of the first COD games that came out many years ago, I can't remember now, my memory is so frail these days. I remembered the single player campaign was fun but short. It was winter second world war (in the game, not RL). And there was no multiplayer.

    How many roads must a man walk down... *singing*

    In other news: Deus Ex 3 is out in two months. Hell yeah!

  • a8a #62 12 months ago

    @coolbrittania
    Check your facts. He called us all cunts.

    The facts are that he made two relevant tweets.

    Tweet 1: The reaction to anything like this is always basically, "where's your sense of humour" or "it'd be fine if it was a man!"

    Tweet 2: The latter of those arguments is particularly odious. Selfish, ignorant, fuckwitted white male whinging. Cunts.

    I realize that coolbrittania is basically just a troll, but this Daily Mail style "I am outraged by this shocking outburst which I have taken totally out of context" self-righteous rubbish is getting old.

  • Mattattattatt #63 12 months ago

    Piracy and second hand sales aren't that much of an issue if your game relies on a subscription service, and a good chunk of your content is only delivered as DLC. I'm sure if consumers accepted it, it would be a very attractive model to companies. It'll be interesting to see if they do go in that direction, if it works and if so how the boxed product evolves.

  • AdverseCamber #64 12 months ago

    "What is the ratio between those audiences [single player/multiplayer]? Online player figures (and CoD's are unquestionably huge) give us some idea, but it's really impossible to know"

    Impossible for us to know, but you can be 100% certain that ActiBlizz has the answer to that already. If they didn't spit out a vast amount of metrics for every player then the data to drive Elite would not exist.

    Right now the "secrect purpose" is to find out if people willing a to pay a subscription to buy early access to content and guarantee receiving all DLC. LA Noire did it as a one off fee, but will people fall for subs? I'd love to see uptake figures comparing those two different paradigms...

    We can only guess at the long term, but subs or pay to play are not inconceivable if this experiment is a success.

  • BlinkeredAxis #65 12 months ago

    The CoD series died creatively after MW2, but the fans and activision have been slow to realise it.

    Bungie tried a payed for service with Halo, but not many fans use it. Problem is, if you offer too much in the payed-for service, the people who payed £50 for the boxed game feel ripped off. If you offer too little (CoD Elite, Halo, Playstation plus etc), then nobody wants it.

    Something like Wow is a different model. You pay monthly, and get something remarkably good, which is constantly added to.

  • sonicyoda #66 12 months ago

    I would pay a small fee each month to watch whoever came up with this idea get repeatedly kicked in the balls over and over by an electronic leg with a boot attached to the bottom. It could be streamed to users via a subscription service. It would only ever stop if people stopped paying. This sounds right up Activision's street!

    STOP MAKING GAMES LESS FUN

  • man.the.king #67 12 months ago

    @coolbritannia

    "Crappest putdown of the year so far"

    I would invite you to do better, but I wouldn't want you to detract from your busy schedule trolling PS3 articles.

  • metalangel #68 12 months ago

    @a8a: at the risk at perpetuating this stupid argument you've restarted, the whole 'cunt' thing was on top of his ridiculous assertion that patting a woman on the butt in a situation so ludicrous that a) it's obviously not real and b) even in context, she's bound to be 'in' on it, was aking to genuine violence, domestic or otherwise. We called him out on it, he called us cunts, his editors did nothing about it.

  • a8a #69 12 months ago

    @metalangel

    Well, since you have managed to completely ignore the facts thus far (and clearly failed to read my comment), I guess theres no point in explaining to you why youre wrong now.

  • Farzlepot #70 12 months ago

    One thing that nobody has pointed out about all this, is the confusion it had generated amongst the annual gamers (that's my term for the folks who rarely play anything other than CoD and/or FIFA each year). I've already heard several of my annual gaming friends and colleagues bitching about how MW3 now has subscription-based multiplayer, and how they won't bother anymore.

    This obviously isn't the case of course, but these aren't the sort of people to read gaming press, and so the message they are being given about Elite is somewhat vague and misleading. If enough of their regular customers are under the impression that CoD no longer has free multiplayer, this whole experiment could backfire on them badly.