Call of Duty, other Activision franchises to get paid-for online services |
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| BY Rain Anderson Nov. 13th, 2009 | More on: |
During yesterday’s BMO Capital Markets Conference, Activision Blizzard CFO Thomas Tippl said gamers should expect additional monetized online services to hit some of their biggest franchises, including Call of Duty.
“It’s definitely an aspiration that we see potential in, particularly as we look at different business models to monetize the online gameplay,” Tippl said when asked if a World of Warcraft’s online business model could make it into the company’s other titles. “There’s good knowledge exchange happening between the Blizzard folks and our online guys.”
“We have great experience also on Call of Duty with the success we had on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. A lot of that knowledge is getting actually built into the Battle.Net platform and the design of that. I think it’s been mutually beneficial, and you should expect us to test and ultimately launch additional online monetization models of some of some of our biggest franchises like Call of Duty.”
Tippl says the demand for such services comes from the core gamer crowd who say “there’s lots of services and innovation they would like to see that they’re not getting yet.”
“From what we see so far, additional content, as well as all the services Blizzard is offering, is that there is demand from the core gamers to pay up for that,” he says.
November 13th, 2009
at 1:15 pm
skimming through that it seems they want to make cod a subscription based game? congratulations they just sold 4 million xbox’s and 3 million ps3s.
pc gamers wont go for that. they’ll just pick up which ever console they prefer and play on that since with no dedicated servers the main reason to play the pc version is gone.
November 13th, 2009
at 3:49 pm
the more i think about it the more i realize thats EXACTLY WHAT ACTIVISION WANTS.
untill now (i think it changed with mw2, cant remember for sure) pc gamers got the dlc for free. with the lack of dedicated servers, pc gamers can’t get custom maps. which means dlc is that much more important to the longevity of the game. consoles have always had to pay for the dlc. and paying $10 every 2 months for new maps certainly beats $10 a month just to play.
overall that would totally be a money grab, and a greedy thing to do. but this is activision, they don’t give a damn.
November 14th, 2009
at 1:43 pm
Just sad really…if Activision really decides to do this, then I will have to say goodbye to Call of Duty. Though I own both systems, I can’t see myself paying for a subscription for the XBox, where I already pay a subscription just to use online services. And I can’t see paying for it on PS3 either…besides I already pay to play WoW.