Call of Duty Digging its Own Grave?

For many a world without Call of Duty would be unimaginable; it has transformed from a simple video game into a cult, with many worshiping it every day. However, is the future of Call of Duty shrouded in mystery?

The launch of Modern Warfare 3 was one of the biggest of all time, and within 5 days of its launch, Activision had brought in $775 million. This obviously shows how much demand there was for this game at launch (although most critics expected it to take the charts by storm in the first few weeks), however is this demand still current? Like most players I played MW3 non stop for the first couple of weeks after launch and loved every moment; not even looking out for flaws in the game or evaluating the actual game. This constant playing has subsequently stopped for many reasons, the main one being boredom, i found myself constantly trying to attempt at finding something new that had been added into the game, yet the more i tried, the more I realised that there was no difference between this and Modern Warfare 2. Other than the obvious weapon and map changes, there's nothing new and innovative about this latest installment and instead just screams copied elements from previous games in the series. This meant that it became more of a novelty and not the compulsive game it had once been.

Although,  this isn’t the only problem with Call of Duty; along with making its users pay out large amounts of money to actually get the game, Activision also decided that it would try and squeeze more money out of its users by developing ‘Call of Duty Elite”, the subscription based service that was launched along side MW3 has had some strong promotion in order to try and grab a large user base, however it has even go so far as to allow Elite subscribers to get DLC before the rest of the users, this greatly excludes a huge user base and encourages the movement of people to Elite. Its not hard to see why many of the gaming community are complaining that ‘Call of Duty’ has become a money making machine and isn’t focused on giving the gamer the best possible experience.

These problems can all be fixed and definitely don't mark the end of Call of Duty’s success by any means. However, it has just been infected with a money making business plan that’s taken greater importance than gamer experience. With careful steps, confidence can be reinstalled into the community and keep this great series alive. In the meantime, it is up to the smaller game developers to enter the market and give big game development companies something to worry about.

This was originally posted on www.aGamingSite.com