Archive for category Development

So called ‘industry analyst’ Michael Pachter has said that progress in the market, publishers need to start charging for the multiplayer experience in games, as currently multiplayer is a nearly free experience.

While the shift has been great for consumers, who are enjoying an unprecedented, and largely free, game experience, it has been devastating for publishers and shareholders, who are seeing sales and profits decline.

Let’s dissect this, first he talks about a ‘shift’ in the multiplayer experience (from what I gather anyway, the source doesn’t explicitly quote what this shift is). Multiplayer gaming hasn’t changed at all since it’s humble beginnings with Quake and UT. You buy the game, and can then play however much multiplayer you want. Next let’s talk about his quote on the cost to the consumer of multiplayer gaming, of which he says is ‘largely free’, which is bollox considering Activision have raised the price of CoD:MW2 to beyond £40 at launch, almost twice what most other multiplayer games charge. Not to mention that the new DLC costs £10 for 3 new maps (and 2 ported ones from CoD4). Finally, lets talk about how he thinks publishers have been devastated by the fall in sales and profits. Come again? That’s rich when you come to Modern Warfare 2 which broke all records of day 1 sales (including records set by movies and other multimedia), and has broken the billion dollar sales mark. Kotick himself has stated that “We’ve heard that 60 percent of [Microsoft’s] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call Of Duty”.

Obviously this guy is an idiot, but never-the-less what he recommends Activision to do is likely going to come true in one way or another.

It is too early to tell whether that will be a monthly subscription, tournament entry fees, micro-transaction fees, or a combination of all three, but we expect to see the company take some action by year-end, when Call of Duty: Black Ops launches.

Kotick even said that he would implement a subscription service tomorrow if Microsoft and Sony would allow it. A CoD MMO has been on the planning tables for a while now, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see where this could lead for the series. Essentially Activision can brand Call Of Duty an MMO by slightly revamping the statistic and leveling system, labeling it an MMO, and charging an extortionate fee or microtransactions for people to play it.

It is likely that Activision will ease the pain of consumers, and will continue to offer some form of free multiplayer, at least for a while, but we believe it is imperative that the company begin to capture some value from the huge number of hours spent – 1.75 billion hours on Xbox Live alone through mid-April and we estimate that this figure is approaching four billion hours combined through today on Xbox Live and PSN

We are quick to point out that the average single player game has an expected play time of under 30 hours, suggesting that a staggering 133 million units of equivalent game play have been spent (so far) playing Call Of Duty online, with Activision only seeing revenues from the original 20m units sold, plus an estimated eight million map packs sold.

Source

This is also very very worth a read, a short history of Activision Blizzard. Basically how Activision are destroying Blizzard from the inside out.