You thought paying $60 for a game was bad enough? THQ says they want you to pay monthly to play those $60 games you’ve been buying and they think that Activision might have the 
answer. Other big companies are also watching to see how this all goes, so it seems a foregone conclusion that games will simply cost more to play, on a monthly or yearly basis.
Activision Blizzard Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, Take Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick and THQ Inc CEO Brian Farrell, all spoke at the Reuters Global Media Summit this week.
"The big win there is you have a consumer base that pays you the subscription fee each month ongoing. That’s a very different revenue model for a video game company, when you have this monthly subscription revenue rather than a one-time purchase," said THQ’s Farrell.
We’ve already seen the start of this with online and season passes and Call of Duty Elite. So it seems that the game companies’ greed is going to magnify itself once again and now start making gamers pay fees for continued access to the games.
Remember, EA is already doing something as well with their sports titles. $25 a year gets you early access and some discounts. No, not even free content, just a discount on it.
"They [Activision] are experimenting with ’Call of Duty,’ and we watch with interest to see how that will play out," said Take-Two Interactive’s Zelnick. "I’ve said for years the holy grail of our business is to take a packaged goods release and turn it into a subscription model."
If the Call of Duty Elite model pays off for Activision, you can bet that every large budget title will cost you $110 or more to continue playing over time. Want to play online with some friends who have a certain map and you don’t? Oh, too bad, it’s only available with a $50 a year subscription, on top of the $60 initial buy in.
So while they all admit that it’s a tough economy, they decided that charging you more is the way to go. They seem to forget that the bad economy is far harder on the consumers than it is on them.
Unfortunately, they’ve already got one million people on Elite meaning they’ve pulled in $50 million and for what? So far there’s little to talk about on Elite aside from stats tracking and some new video content. They seem to be making groups so that you can add your stats to say, fans of a football team, residents of a country or city but really, this does nothing to add to gameplay in the end.
Sure, Elite is a cool information resource, but much of the information that’s available; maps, weapons, other equipment, can also b e found online for free.
This seems to be an outgrowth from downloadable content packs where they had us paying extra for content that was completed and should have been included in the actual game. Instead of paying $60 for 100% of the game, you’re now paying for just 70-80% and then are required to pay more to get the rest of it. That smacks of unadulterated greed if you ask me. There are numerous examples of DLC announcement prior to a game’s release, some of which were available the day the game launched. So obviously that content was ready to roll out with the game itself, yet they wanted to get that little extra money from the gamers because now, they know they can.
The future might be bright with bigger and better games and digital delivery, but it will cast a terribly dark shadow with these new subscription fees. Personally, I don’t feel that Call of Duty Elite is worth $50 a year because it’s done nothing for my gameplay experience. It’s a stand alone that so far has proven an interesting diversion but of no real, lasting value.
Apparently, they have failed to see that even the traditional MMO scene is changing and what was once a thriving pay-to-play game genre is going free-to-play with micro-transactions. Instead of building more cost into the games they should be building in less and giving gamers more choice as to the content they want to purchase, like many MMO games do. I’m not suggesting they do the exact same thing with time-limited items, but with all the added competition of games like Blacklight Retribution, they need to rethink a more cost efficient model for their games, not a more cost intensive one.
