Kotick Wants Call of Duty Subscriptions "Tomorrow"

[Playbahnosh]

Asscricket! I never heard that one, I love it XD

OT: I think I will slowly but surely quit gaming. This, "let's ruthlessly extort the gaming crowd until we cause another Video Game Crash" is just stupid. I mean, you pay the full price for the game($60), then pay for DLCs(~$20), map packs(~$15), the online subscription(~$20/month) and the extra in-game items(~$20) too. That's a total of around $120 plus a monthly fee of $20. And that's only one game. My goddamn rent is lower than that.

No matter, after the second Video Game Crash, it'll be a bleak world for us...

I think you hit the nail on the head there. Bobby Kotick will just price everyone out of games. I hope whoever pays that man's salary fires him as soon as possible. Because Mr Kotick's voracious greed will destroy gaming for everyone.

Mr. Kotick pays his own salary, he is the CEO. Well, that's not entirely true, there is the board of directors, but those assholes don't care about anything other than profit margins so, Kotick's new idea will more likely earn him a raise if anything. Fuck capitalism!!!...ahem...

On the other hand, it's not entirely Kotick's fault. I mean there are people who will pay his retarded subscriptions and grin like the idiots they are.

It's the TV Shop effect: first, they present some horribly overpriced, useless gadget that no one in their right mind would buy ("here, buy our half-finished, bugged, retarded game with soul-murdering DRM for $120"). But then, they start to pile on the extras, gifts and other stuff you get for FREE[footnote]imagine this word in ten feet high, concrete letters with blinking colors and serarchlights[/footnote]. Free stuff makes people go crazy! ("for this sum, you'll get the day-0 DLC, the day-0 patches, that make the game actually playable, and an extra map! YEAH!"). Now the deal is getting better and better in your mind. Enter time-sensitive offers! ("If you pre-order NOW, and we mean NOW, you get our extra special gift, a HORSE ARMOR[footnote]or any gimmicky, totally useless crap, that LOOKS GOOD![/footnote]!"). Now, that $120 deal doesn't look so bad, is it? I mean, all that FREE stuff you get. But the bomb is yet to come, EXCLUSIVE content! ("for a measly $20 a month, you get access to our VIP stuff, behind the scenes videos, a plush keychain and of course ONLINE MULTIPLAYER!"). And you are sold, you start digging for your credit card. I mean, how can you say no to THAT?! It's a fucking giveaway!!

What people don't realize, that all that stuff combined does not worth half that money. They are using very old, dazzling marketing schemes, that are older than the pyramids, and people still eat them like the retards they are. FREE stuff always makes people crazy. Time sensitive offers makes you impulse-buy the shit out of anything! Exclusive content makes you feel like a special snowflake. In reality, none of that is true. There is no such a thing as free lunch. Time sensitive offers get repeated all the time and exclusive content is not really exclusive at all, since anyone can get them if they pay up. It's all a fucking con, nothing else.

I sympathize with pirates more and more. I mean, it's wrong not paying for games at all, but at least they are not so stupid to pay double or triple prices for a piece of shit game...

 

[squid5580]

How many times do they think they can charge us to play a game. 300 for the console, 5-10 bucks a month for gold (who knows what Sony will charge), 60 for the game and then a subscript fee on top of that. They will still probably charge for more maps to boot. I hope MS and Sony make a stand on this one.

 

[Neurowaste]

Even before Modern Warfare 2 was released I said that would be my last Call of Duty purchase so at this point all I can say is that the series had it coming with the frat-boy, 12-year old audience, and terrible direction. This is just more proof of what happens when a business interest takes over a legitimate drive to make a better video game experience. Dear Activison, fuck you sideways.

 

[Doug]

And of course he's going to say it's for consumer benefit. Quite how it will be, when he hasn't appeared to make any mention of how he'll improve the system with the extra revenue (just the fact that Activision will have more money), I don't know...

Kotick doesn't understand the term "Customer Care", I don't think, given he seems to think its inchangeable with "Wallet Raping".

Eh, business-wise he seems to know what he's doing, and is in fact remarkably good at it. It's just that all of the (highly successful) methods he implements to earn him more money make him look like a douche.

Business wise, he's good at what he does, but a) he pisses off his company's consumers, and b) he's just a 'douche' of a man (though why people can't just call him an arsehole, I dunno).

 

[Zhukov]

Well, yet another reason that I'm glad I stopped buying Call of Duty games after the first one.

 

[Kedgeree]

It's at this point in my imagination that Dice would suddenly step in and propose a subscription fee that they would pay their players to play Bad Company 2 just to spite Kotick.

Now we all know Kotick is high, but the question is; when?

 

[Professor Cubbage]

audiences are clamoring for it
make the game even more fun to play
players would just have so much of a more compelling experience

Those are the three most wrong things I have heard in the past 10 years.

 

[AWAR]

Please God, dont make this happen to Black Ops!

Oh well, there's still Bad Company 2

 

[Jenkins]

Kotick is the biggest fucking twat in the industry, he makes EA look innocent

 

[diggy140892]

You say a lot of people are gonna stop playing now. I have to disagree, I know people so addicted to this pile of **** that they would still pay to play it online.

 

[Not-here-anymore]

And of course he's going to say it's for consumer benefit. Quite how it will be, when he hasn't appeared to make any mention of how he'll improve the system with the extra revenue (just the fact that Activision will have more money), I don't know...

Kotick doesn't understand the term "Customer Care", I don't think, given he seems to think its inchangeable with "Wallet Raping".

Eh, business-wise he seems to know what he's doing, and is in fact remarkably good at it. It's just that all of the (highly successful) methods he implements to earn him more money make him look like a douche.

Business wise, he's good at what he does, but a) he pisses off his company's consumers, and b) he's just a 'douche' of a man (though why people can't just call him an arsehole, I dunno).

Oh, that's simple - arsehole is overused, douche isn't (yet).

And no, the vast majority of the people he pissed off are those that follow gaming news; those that understand the distinction made between 'hardcore' and 'casual' gamers, whether they agree with such a distinction or not. Activision, however, appeals to a market of people who play games casually (who are, apparently, different things to a casual gamers) - people who play the Call of Duty games for the associated image, the loud actiony-ness of the thing, and hey, because they're kinda fun. Likewise the Guitar Hero series - pick up, play for a couple of minutes/hours, put down. Essentially, not the people here, who put a lot of thought into the games we buy and get upset if we end up with rubbish games or get ripped off. So, he upsets some of his consumers, but not the majority, who don't pay as much attention - the gaming subculture is still a social outlier, so isn't followed as heavily as, say, the film or music cultural scene.

If you can't be bothered to read all of that, the last sentence tries to sum it up. And probably fails.

 

[Notsomuch]

The only possible way this would make sense is if they added a small subscription, like 4.99-7.99 a month and then offered new content like weapons, updates and maps progressively for free (by which I mean the price of the subscription). So you would actually be paying for something they are offering rather than taking away something they had already offered unless you pay a monthly fee. As it stand a subscription only takes away from what they are already offering which kind of sucks. They've mentioned what they want (the subscription) but they haven't mentioned what, if anything, extra are they going to offer in return. A prescription might increase the quality but online FPS' have for the most part already been able to offer quality online play for only the price of the game and the internet you are using, for years. This currently only makes sense in the context that they want more money from consumers without offering anything that hasn't already been included in the original online play for free, pre-subscription.

 

[Frozen Donkey Wheel2]

Wait, what? How does paying extra to play help them..help us? They can already give us updates for free, an extra subscription fee won't change that. This is money grubbing at it's most shamelessly obvious.

 

[MR.Spartacus]

Oh darn I guess I'll just have to keep playing BC2, TF2 and L4D2. The other important question is will they actually fix the servers? Getting kicked every third game isn't and having to wait fifteen minutes to start again isn't what I'd call fun.

 

[Canid117]

And this can be recorded in the history books as the moment I never buy a Call of Duty game ever again. Hell the only games I might buy from this company is from the Blizzard side but that is because they earned my loyalty with Diablo I, II and Warcraft 3 and as far as I am aware Kotick has no real control over them. You have no such history Kotick! Fuck you!

 

[mattttherman3]

Well it would have to be mmo, not just matchmaking, for me to want to pay to play.

 

[Rayansaki]

Well, was about time, hope they do this for Black Ops so people can stop buying this crap and spend the money on a good game instead. Or on a lot of Cornetto's.

 

[MrDarkling]

It's the deep breath before the plunge....

 

[Yureina]

Well, i'm never gonna play a CoD game ever again, or really ever buy an activision game without some serious thought. There's a difference between good business sense and just being greedy, and Kotick has sent himself over that line with a space rocket.