Absolutely nothing, say it again...
Perhaps by now you've heard, Activision is giving gamers the 'option' of paying monthly for 'extra' features, dubbing the service, Call of Duty Elite.
And the title tells you everything you need to know about the idea as a whole: it sucks.
But anyone can say that. Here are some reasons why it sucks:
1) 15$ map packs proved that gamers are willing to pay big bucks for what amounts to very little actual content. This is the next logical progression of that mindset. Can you imagine what the next step in this evolution of wallet-rape looks like? I shudder at the thought.
2) Even if it is cheap (say, 5$ a month), you likely won't be able to hold on to the content that you have access to for the duration of your subscription. So when it's all said and done, the map packs, by comparison, almost seem like a better deal, as shocking as that is to admit. Unless you only plan to play the game for a month or two, in which case, I guess you win?
3) It stratifies the playerbase. Now you have players who have access to more information about the game they already own (info that is likely free online, like over head views of maps, weapon info, etc), but within the context of CoD, you aren't competitive unless you're paying for elite, because the assumption is that it will provide something that you can't get anywhere else, whether that is true or not.
4) If you're going to charge a monthly fee, you'd better be ready to support your game after release. I'm not sure they are ready for this yet. Modern Warfare 2 barely received map pack love, and it took ages for it to surface. Treyarch, the guys behind Black Ops, planned a bit better, but still. By the time both of these games received their first map pack update, I was already done playing them. I had moved on to something more substantive.
5) Call of Duty's gameplay isn't worth an online fee. Sorry, but it isn't. It's the equivilant to charging people who love Halo for the extra stuff that Bungie simply put in as an afterthought (Bungie.net, ability to share matches, etc) simply because they know people will pay for it. It's like adding one new feature to Madden each year and charging full price for each iteration.
I know some people's lives revolve around Call of Duty, but for those of us that enjoy games as a medium, this kind of development is extremely troubling. Let us not even speak of the fact that they've completely molested a series I've been playing since I was in my teens, squeezing every last drop of monetary value from its lean, rotting carcass. Let us not speak of the developments in the console realm of 'releasing' DLC that is already on the disc, waiting to be unlocked by a 100kb file that costs five real dollars.
Let's just talk about what this encourages within the gaming industry as a whole.
It's bad enough that companies are willing to charge for more weapons. Or characters. Or cars. What's worse is that we are willing to pay for them. Discovering this, they will continue to push the line further and further back until it is difficult to tell where we stand on the issue. Do we continue to buy into their bullshit, because they hold the rotting corpses of our favorite video game franchises? Or do we start to popularize games like Minecraft where a one time, nominal fee includes all updates? For life.
I will say that Minecraft forced me to think more than Call of Duty ever did. Granted, I can't discount CoD for getting me interested in war history in the first place, but I certainly didn't spend as much time thinking creatively about how to do anything other than kill in CoD. In Minecraft, I'm forced to use every available tool my imagination has stored in order to achieve my goals (which I can make up as I go). So now, here I am, comparing the two. Obviously, there is no comparison to be made. They are different types of games. The point I am trying to get across is that gamers expect a particular amount of return on their investment on a given title. Folks who own game systems in order to play Call of Duty do not give two shits about Minecraft, nor do they have any clue why people would play a game that looks like that. There is a huge difference between the two types. Gamers won't swallow a monthly fee for an arcade FPS shooter as easily, because they know it doesn't mesh with their expectations (and they generally know a decent value when they see one, but maybe I'm giving us too much credit.) Regular folks who love CoD and could not possibly care less about other video games on the other hand (their audience), will eat this shit up.
So, I'm not really their customer anyway. But it sets a terrible precedent.
Especially if it succeeds.
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