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Analyst: Activision Should Charge for CoD Multiplayer

This further illustrates my point. 10 million copies x $60 each = $60million. Take those same 10 million users and multiply that by $20/month for 1.5 years (expected life of a title) and you wind up with $2.4billion. The game companies will soon believe that they are "losing" money with their current business model. Once they realize the cash cow that is subscription based gaming....watch out.

I forgive you because it is Friday, but I'm pretty sure that is $600 million!
 
I'm telling you man. There is this club see. We aren't in it. Be thankful for that.
 
the sad thing is, even after all the money they'd earn on MP subscription fees........... they'd still make shitty formulaic generic shooter games that we've seen before.

1. earn $1 billion
2. make another shitty shooter
3. rinse n repeat.


if you look at the MP component, it's been the same old shit for the last 10 years- deathmatch, some variation of capture the flag in a new skin........
when will/do people get tired of this shit?
 
if you look at the MP component, it's been the same old shit for the last 10 years- deathmatch, some variation of capture the flag in a new skin........
when will/do people get tired of this shit?

Decent point, but when do people get tired of Baseball, Futbol, Football, Basketball? Some people PREFER the same ol shit.
 
There is a huge difference between charging to play an online FPS and an MMORPG. Companies like Blizzard can charge $15/month to play WoW because they add new content every month or so. Unless they plan on adding new maps, weapons, vehicles, gameplay modes, etc. every month, I cannot see any reason to charge a monthly fee to play CoD online (except, of course, gravy money for the game publisher).
 
Starcraft wasn't unique and different. Command and Conquer, Dune, and a few other RTS games came before Starcraft. I disagree with your FPS assessment. There are quite a few of them that are still fun to play. The trick is to deliver a good story behind the game, not just make it look good.
Good stories end, though. That's key. Sure, I played through each episode of Half Life and Half Life 2 a few times, but I was done in a matter of weeks for each one.

Basically, he's advocating games that end so that we pick up the next one or multiplayer that we continually pay for so it doesn't matter.

I imagine he's not a fan of games like Civilization or Master of Orion with no story and infinite replayability.
 
Activision publishes someone else's work.

On XBox360 (as an example) Microsoft pays for and maintains the network for the game and sells the technology that allows Activision to have a vehicle for their game to be displayed.

Why should Activision get to charge a fee for their multiplayer? What exactly did they contribute?

Total failure.
The multiplayer isn't even that interesting. Shoot other player in head,laugh,taunt, rinse, repeat.

At least in WoW or other MMORPGs there's some aspect of social networking that adds to the game in general.
 
On XBox360 (as an example) Microsoft pays for and maintains the network for the game and sells the technology that allows Activision to have a vehicle for their game to be displayed.

Why should Activision get to charge a fee for their multiplayer? What exactly did they contribute?

On Xbox live, you paid for the internet and modem/router, and the game and console that allows Microsoft to have a veichle for their onlive service.

Why should Microsoft get to charge a fee for their multiplayer?
 
Good stories end, though. That's key. Sure, I played through each episode of Half Life and Half Life 2 a few times, but I was done in a matter of weeks for each one.

Basically, he's advocating games that end so that we pick up the next one or multiplayer that we continually pay for so it doesn't matter.

I imagine he's not a fan of games like Civilization or Master of Orion with no story and infinite replayability.

True, but sometimes you can take an old story and put a new twist to it. We had Final Fantasy and EverQuest and Morrowind and a few other fantasy-based games, and you'd think we would get tired of it when Blizzard launched World of Warcraft, but their lore was like no other. It had depth. It had history. It had a beautiful blend of serious and humor. A powerful fan base behind it. I could spend days just reading their web site and wowwiki.com gobbling up their story, forgetting there's a game there, and then when I play it, I take in the story surrounding me. That's why I loved the game. Haven't played it since last September, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted.

Anyone's welcome to make another World War II FPS even, but it has to captivate me with a story that's unique from any other World War II games out there. Wolfenstein is interesting because they didn't just put zombies in the game, but they also backed their story up with a bit of lore. Ditto Star Wars games. They can make another Star Wars game, but don't keep repeating the movies. Go deeper and tell us another story about that universe.

I guess that's what makes me a geek. I look for things beyond the game themselves.
 
But if it ends up on steam for 3$
Then the $60M purchase number would be closer to correct while the billions in subscription fees wouldn't change.

There is a huge difference between charging to play an online FPS and an MMORPG. Companies like Blizzard can charge $15/month to play WoW because they add new content every month or so. Unless they plan on adding new maps, weapons, vehicles, gameplay modes, etc. every month, I cannot see any reason to charge a monthly fee to play CoD online (except, of course, gravy money for the game publisher).
Valve just posted an update for the Engineer in TF2. They've made a number of major updates since the 2007 release; more like quarterly, though. From http://www.teamfortress.com:

The Engineer Update (07/08/10)

The Mac Update (06/10/10)
119th Update (04/29/10)
WAR! Update (12/17/09)
Hallowe'en Special (10/29/09)
Classless Update (8/13/09)
The Sniper vs. Spy Update (5/21/09)
The Scout Update (2/24/09)
A Heavy Update (8/19/08)
The Pyro Update (6/19/08)
The Gold Rush Update (4/29/08)
View All...
 
Valve just posted an update for the Engineer in TF2. They've made a number of major updates since the 2007 release; more like quarterly, though.

The difference between activision and valve though...Is that valve seem to make games because they LIKE games. Activision seem to do whatever because they like money. Games never used to be big buisness. 80% of games used to make no profit. I don't know if that is still true, but theres definately more BUISNESS then there was before.
 
True, but sometimes you can take an old story and put a new twist to it. We had Final Fantasy and EverQuest and Morrowind and a few other fantasy-based games, and you'd think we would get tired of it when Blizzard launched World of Warcraft, but their lore was like no other. It had depth. It had history. It had a beautiful blend of serious and humor. A powerful fan base behind it. I could spend days just reading their web site and wowwiki.com gobbling up their story, forgetting there's a game there, and then when I play it, I take in the story surrounding me. That's why I loved the game. Haven't played it since last September, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted.

Anyone's welcome to make another World War II FPS even, but it has to captivate me with a story that's unique from any other World War II games out there. Wolfenstein is interesting because they didn't just put zombies in the game, but they also backed their story up with a bit of lore. Ditto Star Wars games. They can make another Star Wars game, but don't keep repeating the movies. Go deeper and tell us another story about that universe.

I guess that's what makes me a geek. I look for things beyond the game themselves.
I don't disagree with any of the above and it proves this guy's point. Final Fantasy, Morrowind, and the non-MMORP Star Wars games are series, so you have to keep paying to continue the story. WoW is pay-to-play.
 
The difference between activision and valve though...Is that valve seem to make games because they LIKE games. Activision seem to do whatever because they like money. Games never used to be big buisness. 80% of games used to make no profit. I don't know if that is still true, but theres definately more BUISNESS then there was before.
Valve is a private company so they don't have any institutional shareholders breathing down their necks. So yeah, they don't feel compelled to nickel-and-dime us to death, despite the fact that they are delivering the content that would justify it... to the likes of Activision and the 'analysts' who follow them.
 
...

I imagine he's not a fan of games like Civilization or Master of Orion with no story and infinite replayability.

We're going to have to start charging you $0.50 per game of Civ, and $0.01 per turn. I hope you don't mind.
 
I still play CoD4 online....why? It's super competitive due to the long time players out there...it plays smooth with all the eye candy on (such as it is)...it has DEDICATED servers...MW2 sucks and is gimmicky.
 
But then everyone would Pirate the game.... Wait a sec, didn't BF:BC2 sell a shit ton of copies? Oh yeah it did.

But how would they push overpriced mappacks if people could create free maps for those servers? :D

Anyway I fully support Patcher here activision should start charging for playing CoD then maybe more people would buy good games :p
 
You don't think CoD is a good game? It's not the absolute best or anything, but even I, who don't play a lot of FPS games, think it's a very fun game. However... nothing really gets me going like UT99 did.
 
People would be willing to pay 1$ a month or something similar to play MW2 online.....

If they didn't pull the douchebaggery of p2p instead of dedicated servers..

If they got rid of all the hacking, at a much more reasonable rate.. and included a way to report hackers.. as it stands people can blatantly admit to hacking and you cant easily report them on steam. I've wanted to report 10+ people for blatantly admitting it... but you have to fucking dig through too much to find anyway to report them.

If they didn't fucking charge for map packs.. especially maps we've already paid for in MW1.

If they actually gave a fuck about the community...









Yeah so we'll never be paying monthly for COD. Fucking idiots.
 
I find it interesting that people are so quick to resign themselves to accepting this "as the inevitable future" when in reality, if that were true it would have happened by now.

The market will decide what the future is. Not some guy with a huge ass number of $$'s that he is fantasizing about using fancy math for monthly fees etc. They can try it, but most likely they will end up making just a smidge more than they are now since many people won't buy into it. Other competing products will come around that keep the current model intact and will hold the market for the people that want to keep buying into it.

Quite frankly, there is no chance in hell I would EVER pay $20 a month to play an FPS online. $35 a year for XBL is just about all I'm willing to pay.
 
Patcher just likes to say outrageous shit. When I was doing news blurbs for the Escapist he made life easy for me by always saying something out of left field.
 
I can't afford to even buy games most of the time, if they started charging monthly fees for the games I play I wouldn't play games anymore.


hell, 90 percent of the games I own I buy when steam is running the holiday specials, otherwise I would probably still be playing quake 3.
 
I don't have MW2 period. I'm sticking with my original plan when I signed the MW2 Multi-player petition.

I play Bad Company 2 because of dedicated servers.
 
I don't have MW2 period. I'm sticking with my original plan when I signed the MW2 Multi-player petition.

I play Bad Company 2 because of dedicated servers.

I tried playing it a couple times on the free weekends. You haven't missed anything.
 
sadly, there's prolly enough mindless COD fanboys for this work
 
Thanks to the strengthening of internet based services and access speed, piracy has become the competing business model (un)fortunately.

Mulit player piracy is almost non existent in the biggest consumer market in the world. You argument is null with regards to pay to play.

Out of the few hundred cracked cod4 servers out there only a hand few are US based.
 
On Xbox live, you paid for the internet and modem/router, and the game and console that allows Microsoft to have a veichle for their onlive service.

Why should Microsoft get to charge a fee for their multiplayer?

That one is simple, and I thought Kyle made it clear in post #3. Playing online MP games that require any accuracy with your thumbs is foolish. You should be fined for being that stupid. :D
 
Except that, joking aside, it's completely irrelevant since everyone is also limited to the same controller.
 
I have to admit, the first thing that went through my head upon reading that blurb from Pachter was something along the lines of "You can't be serious, can you? Are you really a gamer in disguise just trying to get Activision to really screw something up?"
 
I am starting to think that DRM and pay to play models will become so outrageous that eventually everyone will just say "screw gaming" and go do other things, then there will be this gaming dark age and eventually a company will come along and make things right again.
 
I am starting to think that DRM and pay to play models will become so outrageous that eventually everyone will just say "screw gaming" and go do other things, then there will be this gaming dark age and eventually a company will come along and make things right again.

And we will call them Valve. Oh, wait... ;)
 
An idiot that knows nothing about gaming gives his expert opinion about gaming. Nothing to see here, move along.
 
Originally Posted by LeninGHOLA
I forgive you because it is Friday, but I'm pretty sure that is $600 million!



The correct math is 10 million users times $60 per game is $600 million. If those same 10 million users pay $20/month for 1.5 years (average lifespan of a title) you end up with $3.6Billion.
 
While I don't agree with the statement in the news article - I'd really like some of you to give me your ideas on some new gameplay types or "innovations" you'd put into your next FPS if you got the chance. I mean you had Doom. Then you had the true 3D FPS games that wowed you. Then you got all these awesome multiplayer modes which were great. Perhaps I'm just not flowing with creativity at the moment, but I am at a loss when I try to imagine how the next great FPS would play or what innovative features it could bring that we haven't all seen before. You can only do so much when development gets costlier and costlier. You've gotta balance development costs between graphics, cinematics, the story, etc, and you all expect MORE MORE MORE every time.

Most of you just complain too damned much.
 
They don't care about community mapping; they are willing to pay for small map packs.
They don't care about dedicated servers and being able to kick cheaters at will; they will buy the game anyway.
They don't care about mods that extend the gameplay or make it better/more competitive; they will but the game anyway.

Call of Duty players represent everything that is wrong with gaming. I hope Activision milks them for everything they're worth, because one of two things will happen to CoD players:
  1. They will get the bad treatment that they have been inviting for the last couple of years or
  2. They will finally see Activision for what it is.
And as for Activision, you can make money off your customers without being dicks about it. A lot of game companies produce games with the intention of making a game that lots of people will enjoy. Activision churns out games that keep their shareholders happy.
 
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