14 DAY TRIAL // Michael Pachter, the well known Wedbush Securities analyst, has modified his claims that Activision would impose subscription based model for the multiplayer component of the Call of Duty series starting with the upcoming Black Ops entry. This comes after Activision's outright denial through various channels that its customers will have to pay to play Call of Duty games online.
“I don't want to call out any of the blog posts or tweets or statements to IGN as untruthful,” he has recently said for GamesIndustry.biz. “Rather, I think that they probably are true: Activision won't require people to play for multiplayer, but I think that they will find a way to offer a premium experience for a fee, whether that takes the form of subscription, pay-as-you-go, microtransactions for virtual goods, tournament fees or some combination.”
He continued to comment that, “will continue to move in the direction of extracting more revenue from gamers. In my view, Activision is motivated to charge for multiplayer, has a window of opportunity to do so, and can extract greater profits if it imposes a charge. It makes logical sense (to me at least) that given their motivation and opportunity, coupled with their past behaviour, they will charge in the future. Call of Duty is the most likely candidate due to the large number of users.”
He bases these statements in Bobby Kotick's open intentions to find a way to translate the success of the Call of Duty franchise in a business model akin to World of Warcraft. Pachter also said that a premium based model would be the most fair way to adequately monetize this online game services provided by publishers and that this model would surely be successful. This would be a financially sound move, in his opinion, even if he wasn't really an advocate of charging consumers for this kind of multiplayer experience.