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Activision Would Like to Provide More Value for Xbox 360 Call of Duty Players

Bobby Kotick still dreams about the CoD MMO

Jul 5, 2010 22:01 GMT  ·  By
Bobby Kotick
   Bobby Kotick

Bobby Kotick, Activision's infamous chief executive officer, has restated once again his wish for an Activision owned massively multiplayer online medium for Call of Duty. The franchise has gotten a massive following on consoles, similar to what World of Warcraft has achieved on the PC. Unfortunately for Kotick's company, because of both the PlayStation 3 and especially the Xbox 360's closed network systems, Activision can't actually monetize this popularity as much as possible.

“We've heard that 60 per cent of [Microsoft's] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call of Duty,” Bobby Kotick said in a recent Financial Times interview, via Kotaku. “We don't really participate financially in that income stream. We would really like to be able to provide much more value to those millions of players playing on Live, but it's not our network.”

It is not the first time Kotick has stated his wish for a Call of Duty massively multiplayer online game. As for the environments targeted, the PC would be the most obvious choice, but Kotick was worried about the piracy. The two consoles were not an option because of the additional fees platform holders demand from the third parties for online functionality. There might be a chance for Kotick's wish to come true on the PlayStation 3, after Valve's recent announcement of the release of Portal 2 along with Steamworks on Sony's console. This is a first for the industry, as Sony allows Valve to attend to its game through its own means and not through the PlayStation Network.

Kotick also saw the recent attempts of Dell and HP to sell multimedia PCs that could easily connect and be used on a TV as another chance to find a popular, but also open medium where his company could really make a profit out a possible Call of Duty MMO. For the time being, however, Activision has cemented a deal with Microsoft, despite its closed LIVE network, that will last until 2012 and sees Call of Duty downloadable content being released first on the Xbox 360 and later on the PC and PlayStation 3.