Plans for a Call of Duty MMO?

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick likes to keep people on their toes. And it's not as much about what he is saying, as it is about what he is not saying. In a lecture that he delivered at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, the boss from Activision made a few interesting comments about the possible results of Activision and Blizzard's merger.

"Just the few hours of conversations we've had in brainstorming has given us a lot of value..." said Kotick. "And then when you think about other properties that we own and control like Call of Duty, and what would be the natural evolution of a property like Call of Duty into a massively multiplayer environment, and how do you monetize that, the same rules apply." In other words, even though he has recently said that it would take a huge investment to compete with World of Warcraft, Kotick is thinking that Call of Duty could make an MMO to rival that developed by Blizzard.

Kotick has also revealed that although Activision has researched the MMO for some time before entering talks with Blizzard, they had decided that the risks involved in creating an MMO without prior experience would be too great. This realization was one of the reasons that talks with Blizzard began.

Also talking about the merger between the two game giants, Kotick declared that other developments were in the works, including an effort to take Guitar Hero to the Chinese and Korean markets, and a project to create and deploy new revenue streams for Starcraft.

The real interesting part of the conference was that Call of Duty MMO reference he made. It is certainly an interesting possibility to think that a persistent world filled with soldiers fighting wars could be delivered to players. But, on closer inspection, there are a few issues regarding the idea. Such a world would need a strong backstory to it to be more than an endless show of mutiplayer sessions and although Call of Duty has delivered backstory in more than satisfying ways for the single player, it's kinda hard to see how they could translate that to a MMO.

When and if the people at Activision say more about Call of Duty and MMOs, we'll provide the details.