That annual slush fund grates Kotick because they don’t ”participate financially”, only one-off DLC charges bring them cash. That makes him sad.
Microsoft charges £39.99 for a 12 month subscription to Xbox Live if you want to go Gold and be able to play multiplayer games online with Xbox 360, or access certain other XBL services. Kotick would really love some of that revenue to build a cash fort out of.
”We’ve heard that 60 per cent of subscribers are principally on Live because of Call of Duty,” he commented to the Financial Times, reports Eurogamer.
”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.” Call of Duty reigns supreme on consoles with PC lingering behind.
Home consoles ”do a very good job of supporting the gamer,” Kotick said. ”If we are going to broaden our audiences, we are going to need to have other devices.”
Acti Blizz will be ”very aggressively” supporting devices that bridge PC to TV. Kotick has mentioned Call of Duty expanding its influence before by way of a subscription-based model like an MMO or something. He’d have one running ”tomorrow” if he could.
Activision already put a high price entry to the latest Call of Duty videogames for both console and PC, as well as charge around £10 for DLC map packs and now he wants a subscription revenue stream too. Have you helped Kotick build his fort of cash?
