Oh well, I had to be more clear.
While Blizzard's games are indeed mainstream, Blizzard is not dependent on Activision, they can make money by themselves. They can afford to sell just their own games on b.net and swim in money.

Yeah, I know that. I also know they hold some autonomy. Still I would think battle.net and a multiplayer shooter would be a match made in piles of money for Activision.

Even remove the battle.net part, I still am surprised they haven't gone the subscription game route on the PC yet. Activision basically makes half their money from WoW and Kotick talks about getting more into subscriptions constantly. I don't think a facebook service like this is going to do it. If they made a real Call of Duty game that you pay $15 a month for with dedicated servers, 64 players, new monthly maps, events, new modes, great support and whatever else it would be a mega-hit I am sure, assuming it ran on a wide range of hardware. It might not get 10 million players like the Xbox version does but it would get millions of players paying $15 a month for years to play it.

Making people pay to visit a glorified official website with some extra stuff is slightly different imo. The hats are just a funny way of making some extra money.

The COD thing is taking a service traditionally provided for free and making fanboys pay for it. That's a worrying development.

and left 4 dead, given the choice I'd probably prefer the hats

Thank god im a Battlefield player.

And that's why I hate and I will always hate "social networking" and "cloud computing" disgusting shit for the rest of my lifetime....

Hats are completely cosmetic and don't affect gameplay. They also drop randomly/can be crafted out of surplus drops, so they are not even exclusive to those that buy them. Considering that they are completely optional, and the amount of free content updates TF2 gets, well, it's not really all that comparable.

Paying more money for silly hats than for most of the games in Steam's catalogue is silly though.
Also, hats in Portal 2's multiplayer was both hilariously stupid and stupidly silly.

Kotaku has a good long writeup on it, still sounds like it wouldn't be worth paying for

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/05/how-call-of-duty-elite-works-and-why-you-might-be-paying-for-it/

So basically it's a better, more convenient way to wave your e-peen around and try to impress other mor.. err people with your awesome CoD multiplayer stats.

Now I don't care about Call of Duty at all, so I wouldn't be interested in this even if it was some great, innovative thing, but would even CoD fans pay for that?

Well the mention of being able to win a real jeep was pretty cool but the chances are it'd be us only and end up being won by some 13 year old twat who can't even use it

That game is awesome!





If you intend to play it just once and forget about it, since it is the same thing over and freaking over again.

This seems rather prescient.