Call of Duty Elite, a premium social networking/stat tracking service for Call of Duty online gaming was unveiled this week. And while Activision has yet to reveal, or even decide, which features will cost you every month, and which will be free, it’s not been met with open arms.
But allow me to play devil’s advocate here for a moment. Why shouldn’t Activision try to wring its cash cow dry of milk? If anything, we owe it more money.
In case you missed the whole furore, Activision, publisher of the billion dollar Call of Duty shooter franchise, is launching a service later this year that will track your performance online, showing who you killed and where you died – and match you with others in challenges through a “compete” section. You can see how Call of Duty Elite will work in the trailer below.
To access all these features the cost, though unconfirmed, is rumoured to be in the region of $7.99 (£4.84) per month. And it’s this subscription charge that has not been received warmly by Call of Duty fans.
Says one of our ticked off readers: “I pay Microsoft for the privilege of playing games online through my Xbox 360, plus a very large sum of money for the game which earns the developers and publishers more than enough profits to build and maintain something like Elite for free.”
“It’s like introducing a poor man’s mini Facebook and trying to charge people for it..It was hard enough stumping the cash for multiplayer on the Xbox when I’ve spent so many years playing online for free on my PC.”
Another player has even started a protest campaign against the move, as you can see in the video below.
Now I get the hostility. Nobody likes paying every month for something, on top of the upfront prices, and intermittent DLC map pack costs – especially when Microsoft already charges a monthly fee to play online through Xbox Live.
But let’s take a step back here. Activision isn’t fencing off existing features that were free to play, but adding new ones if you want to pay. It’s even said it will never charge. So why not try this, when so many people get so many hours of enjoyment out of the series? To give you an example, Modern Warfare 2 players alone racked up 200,000 years of gameplay time on its multiplayer mode in the space of six months. 200,000 years.
It’s worth remembering how little game prices have gone up over the years. In fact, in real terms, they’ve gone way down. Most games still cost £39.99 today, and I was paying that much for games back in the 1990s. In fact, Nintendo 64 games cost decidedly more.
And this has remained constant in the face of inflation – £39.99 in 1995 is the equivalent of £56.94 today, according to This Is Money’s inflation calculator. We’re paying almost fifty percent less for games – as development costs have soared exponentially, and as we move to the next generation of consoles in the first half of this decade, that’s likely to continue to increase.
So let me ask you this. Ignore the fact that Activision already makes piles from Call of Duty, and that CEO Bobby Kotick doesn’t exactly enjoy a great reputation amongst gamers. Even if Call of Duty was published by another company, I’d say the same thing:
If games are inflation-proof; if you play a shooter as much as someone plays World of Warcraft (which like many online RPGs charges a monthly fee); if we pay less for games than we ever have; why shouldn’t Activision try to charge for extra services on top of its upfront pricepoint?
Crack on, I say. I certainly won’t be paying, but then I don’t play it all that often. But I’m sure plenty of people will, and if you’re a hardcore CoD fan, you should.
