Happy July Fifth? Mebbe...

Appy-polly-lodges for the late and brief update today. It was a slow news day, and I was running late due to a caffeine-induced bout of insomnia. I'm coping with the swelling as best I can. I'm hoping the pressure stocking will make the pain bearable. So far, it seems to be working. I'm afraid this may already be a chronic condition... Sucks, but what can be done? Moving on...

The first (and only) CoD news link on the blog update today is a story on Bobby Kotick bitching that Xbox Live reaps most of the financial benefit of Call of Duty. His logic is that some 60% of Xbox Live subscribers subscribe due to Call of Duty. I'm a frequent customer of the Department of Statistics Pulled from One's Ass, so let me retort: Most Xbox Live subscribers won't pay extra to play Call of Duty. As good as the Call of Duty games are - and, fanboi bullshit aside, they are all very, very good games no matter which studio - the service from all the developers has not been good enough to warrant me ponying up any extra money a month. All of the developers have been remiss in timely patching, uncommunicative to their customers, and unresponsive to legitimate customer wants and concerns.

    Let me put it this way: The Gold Standards for how to treat an online gaming community are Valve for PCs and Bungie for consoles. Are they perfect? Of course not. But in their fostering of a cohesive online community of players, in providing an infrastructure that promotes that community, and delivering the goods to the player, they make all of the Call of Duty studios look pretty bad. Would I have played extra to play Halo, back when I was hard into it? Yeah, probably. How 'bout when I was hard (and I mean 16 hours a day hard) into Valve's Team Fortress Classic? Fuck, yeah. Yeah, you might think "...But World of Warcraft..." Stop right there. There's no other way to play World of Warcraft except by paying a fee. And, of course, competition in that genre is virtually non-existent in terms of market share. Call of Duty, OTOH, has a lot of worthy (and some might say better) contenders for the throne.
So, word of advice, Bobby: You seem to be making all the wrong moves lately with the Call of Duty franchise. You alienated most of the talent at your arguably most successful studio, you made a series of huge public relations missteps that likewise alienated the small but influential hardcore PC crowd, and you are poised on the brink of driving the Call of Duty franchise into exhaustion. (Guitar Hero XIII: Electric Boogaloo ring any bells?) Frankly, Activision doesn't deserve a monthly fee for me to play any CoD game in existence or even planned. I'm a CoD player. But I'm always looking at and test-driving other games. The day you guys decide to bleed me for a monthly fee is the day I walk. End of line.