14 DAY TRIAL // The head of the Treyarch studio, who is working on the Activision published Call of Duty: Black Ops, has said that he is not thinking about attaching a price to the multiplayer experience and that his team aims to make the game compelling enough for player to hold on to it even after they finish the single player, actually eliminating the secondary market.
Mark Lamia, the leader of the Treyarch team working on Black Ops, told MCV that, “I want to take that in the other direction and bring consumers really great reasons to keep their games, rather than trade them in. Multiplayer is critical to the success of this series. It has such tremendous staying power – there are millions of people playing Call of Duty every day.”
He also assured fans that support for the new game will continue for some time, saying, “We’re going to support the hell out of Black Ops. That will be our focus post-release: making sure we keep our fans engaged, and hopefully as a result, they’ll want to keep playing our game and won’t want to trade it in.”
Lamia is clearly taking a few covert shots at Electronic Arts, the company that has sought to limit used game sales by introducing the Online Pass that is linked to multiplayer and new games, and at analyst Michael Pachter, who has predicted that Activision will soon begin asking players to pay for multiplayer Call of Duty because of lower retail sales.
Call of Duty: Black Ops has already garnered a lot of support from PC gamers because of the team's decision to add modding tools to the video game and for the reinstated support for LAN games.
Call of Duty: Black Ops has a launch date of November 9 and comes to the familiar PC, the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the Wii from Nintendo.