Bobby Kotick's head surprisingly fits well onto satan's body in that picture lol

I like how the article writer skews the number.

"Like this, you're paying 500-600 per year to play games"

The FIRST year. You don't buy a console every year.
And you use your internet ISP for more than just playing games, so that should be factored out of the equation.

So, the article ending should be
"You pay rougly $360 for your first year of online gaming! Then 60/free every year after! Activision wants to tack on 10 bucks!"

I still don't wanna pay for activision online. But I don't own an activision game right now.
Hurr hurr hurr.

Why should I pay a monthly fee to play their games online there is nothing they have to even warrent me playing their games. The only game they have that peaks my interest is Transformers War for Cybertron thats it. This guy is a complete moron. Activision has made nothing worth playing online but CODMW2 and even thats glitchy as hell you fix a glitch another appears imagine how many pist off fans there will be if a new COD game came out and they have to pay to play a glitchy game online because the multiplayer aspect sucks. There will be stories appearing on N4G,IGN,1up about fans suing Activision for a service they pay for that sucks hope this guy knew what he was getting himself into when he started smoking the green.

Whoa.. I agree some of the stuff he says is stupid, and he just wants more money, but who doesn't want that?
You can't blame him for trying to earn few extra million..

The real blame should fall on the people who continuously support him and actually do pay $15 for those few maps.
You can buy whole other games for $15; Braid, Castle Crashers, Trine, PixelJunk.. etc. Yes, he's trying to see how much he can get away with, but are those maps really worth $15, people should be asking themselves that before they buy the pack, then go online to complain about it.

Those who don't buy the pack, more power to you, you can enjoy other games for the same price. Some of which are arguably better.

So the way the industry seems to be heading, if people like Kotick have their way, is to pay a subscription fee to play games with either a strong online component, or only an online component. With even single player games being required to have an online connection which would likely lead to more subscription fees.

Might be time to get out of gaming...thanks Ko-dick...

Now read this part:

"you should expect us to test and ultimately launch additional online monetization models of some of our biggest franchises like Call of Duty."

To me this means there will be actual prices attached within the online component. Whether it's paying $2.99 to play the co-op or $2.99 (these are just examples of pricing) to play deathmatch. Right now a lot of the pay stuff is DLC. What if they broke up the multiplayer components?

Think of a game like M.A.G. where maybe it would cost you $10 to unlock and play Acquisition. Then another $10 to play Domination and so on. This will start to happen. Instead of paying $60 for a complete game it may be broken up in pieces. $40 for the single player campaign, then various prices for different items and modes for online play.

It SOUNDS good in theory. Gamers who normally pay $60 now for a game with a single player campaign and an online multiplayer that they may not play online could pay less. It may still come to $60 total but maybe less to singple player players if it's broken up and giving us more choices. Or it could be more expensive in the end, which is likely going to be more the actual case.

The industry is trying to combat piracy and used games sales along with high development costs. Games costs more than ever to make, it's as simple as that. So how do they recoup those costs without increasing the prices of the games again? If you look back games used to cost in the tens and maybe hundreds of thousands with a handful of developers. Now it's not uncommon for there to be hundreds making a single game for up to 5 years which costs upwards of 100 million dollars. Has software sales increased just as much? I don't think so. So they need to change the business model and it will take a big publisher like Activision and a large scale game to make the shift.

Don't think that the companies won't suck you dry if they think they can. All of them. Gamers made the mistake of shelling out absurd money for MW2 junk and now they know we're willing to do anything.

Activision won't force anyone to pay anything. If they charge a monthly fee for games such as CoD, I doubt many people will pay for it, certainly not in the long term. If gamers are willing to pay, you can't blame Activision for doing it. They're a business, not a charity. It is up to us gamers to make sure that they suffer financially if they pull off such a move. I for one, won't buy another Activision game and I certainly won't pay monthly subscription fees. If competition such as future BF and MoH games don't require monthly fees, then gamers will buy these games over CoD. Unless future CoD games are masterpieces (extremely unlikely) and Activision's online servers are perfect with no connection issues (also unlikely), I can't see many people paying monthly fees to play their games online.

PC gamers will boycott it like they did with live consoles gamers will bend over and say nothing .

The sad thing in all of this is all these folk that say how Activision are evil and how they'll never buy their games again, yet most of them are guaranteed to go back on their words.

See, if people actually all grouped together and done a boycott, it might work, but people can never seem to do it.

so you can watch this lovely, "mc donalds" ad

its getting close

that guy

no more pennies from me to activision titles, not even second hand. i dont want to touch that garbage or even support their titles no more

Im done, no more activision.

F-U-C-K you kotick, i hope you die painfully n slowly.

Chinga tu puta madre Kotick!

Is the later Activision game I will ever buy.

I despise this man and his company! I refuse to ever buy one of their products. I was the only one out of 8 friends that didnt buy the map pack even against constant badgering. I was then inspired to make this. I thought the headset was a nice touch.

Money hungry - that's what this guy is. He's thinking from a business point of view and making up BS that he's "researched" what gamers want! We already pay WAY too much for games and I doubt anyone would want to pay a pay-per-game fee just to play online. Imagine they charge $10 per month PER GAME, that would equate to $120 per year to play, say COD Black Ops. Oh wait, you also want to play COD MW3, that's $240 a year just to play 2 games online.
Let the losers who pay for WoW monthly do that as that how that game was designed. Leave console games as is.

hopefully Kot-dick doesn't ruin that too.

Just don't buy those types of games and the developers will get the idea that people will not pay those fees to play a game. I know development costs are going up but they have to start making games that people really want. People do not want some rushed and glitchy mess of a game. Until they start listening and stop being greedy then I do not see this ending well at all.

Kotick's not saying that there will be an additional monthly fee to play Activision games online. He's trying to set up a service that will allow for people to BUY content for their games. Battle.net is 100 percent free, it always has been and it always will. HOWEVER, what has changed is that Battle.net is now a platform on which you can buy content for your games; unique items for WoW and maps and custom games for Starcraft II.

This is just horse armor all over again. If you don't want to pay for it then dont buy it, its as simple as that.

Tell me again how the multiplatform strategy was supposed to fix everything. Look at your results and compare them to Nintendo, which keeps thriving with exclusives. Your loyal fans are gone. And let’s not forget the pile of IPs you purchased only to let them rot.

The worst thing is this is down from last years numbers/expectations which was down from the previous years numbers/expectations. You think about how long “down” has been a consistent part of the communication and you realize those subscriptions are what’s holding that boat together. The price cut of gamespass is still a price raise in a string of price raises. They are trying to use players to offset the missing revenue. Now call of duty is out of gamespass, which is literally WHY they bought the company. To draw people to the subscription. They realized they missed a boatload of money and that wasn’t sustainable. Now you pay for it like you would have if they never bought the company… so why buy the company? Mind you those billions still need to be paid back. Yeah it gives you a chance to say we make the biggest FPS… but the internal conversations must be brutal at high level on topics that really matter. Like revenue. Profitability. And ROI for the shopping spree.

Is this like the 10th quarter in a row they're down 33% on hardware how is that even mathematically possible. You would think their mediocrity would Plateau