Well there were rumors floating around about this shortly after the release of Call of Duty BlackOps. And now it seems we are seeing the light of those rumors. We are all used to paying $60 a game now, but how about another monthly subscription to play your favorite game? Well now the publisher behind one of the industries biggest games is about to find out whether it can get us to pay for a monthly sub too.

Activision Blizzard Inc. has plans to launch an online service called ‘Call of Duty Elite‘ this fall that will work with the next major iteration of the game ‘Modern Warfare 3‘, as well as future installments of the series. In a move as industry executives are calling, “a first”, Activision plans on charging a monthly subscription fee for the service, including downloadable map packs that will give players “extra” levels to play.

The executives behind this decisions have said they haven’t come to the amount of the fee yet, but they claim it will be cheaper than the industries average in comparable online-entertainment services, such as $7.99 netflix. Portions of the service will be free, including features inspired by Facebook which will let users meet and greet people of similar ilk and fight it out.

Another feature will give users tools, modeled on tools from stock trading websites, to analyze their performance within the game, gaugin factors such as which weapons have been most successful for them in killing enemies.

The plan which has came to us one week before the E3 expo in Los Angeles, is a HUGE risk by Activision that will show just how blood thirsty they already are for gamers hard earn, short supplied, cash in which they have already spent $60 or it simply to purchase the right to pay a monthly fee. Obviously they cite World of Warcraft and the Xbox Live service as reason they think it will work, and show how many issues PC and Playstation players had with the game as reasons to pay extra for basically extra effort from the publishers. I call BS on all of it, and now know for sure what game this year I will not be buying.

One thing to keep in mind folks, even if you are saying, “well extra money means more features and support of the game from them”, these douchebags also made $1 billion during the first 6 weeks of BlackOps alone! Money isn’t going to solve inept developers from delivering more of the same issues, problems, and concerns.

Just keep this quote from Activision Digital VP, Jamie Berger in mind:

All of the digital content that wil be coming out for Modern Warfare 3 and beyond will be all-inclusive as part of the premium membership. We’ve created… a stand-alone development team and studio dedicated only to this one thing,The Beachhead team is a fulltime studio now within CoD whose whole focus is to build and launch the Elite service, and then continue to build and iterate post-launch.

Everyone talks about community, but how you build a community is a whole different thing… rather than being a collective bunch of strangers playing night after night. We want neighborhoods of people playing night after night, and starting to introduce themselves

It appears Mr.Berger’s opinion is nowhere near the pulse of the community. And the sad thing is all the mindless people out there will buy into this garbage and it will start appearing in more and more games. Complete waste of a great used to be great series.

The community is already getting in gear for a full fledged flame war:

I hope this fails miserably. You knew this was coming when it says something like “Every CoD game comes with free multilpayer” right in the menu of the last game….

Game plus 2 DLCs: $90.00. How much more of a ripoff can you get?

Hey, value is relative. I mean some people pay 150 million for a goddamned painting which is nothing more physically than a couple of bucks for some canvas and coloured oil. Obviosuly some people will pay this, though I believe the majority won’t. I still agree that Kodick needs to fuck off and die however.