Activision is all excited as it has announced that Call of Duty map packs have surpassed 20 million units. In total they have released six map packs for Call of Duty games;
- One for Call of Duty 4
- Three for World at War
- Two for Modern Warfare 2
Activision boss Bobby Kotick had the following to say;
“The Call of Duty franchise is unique in the world of entertainment and delivers one of the best multiplayer experiences ever.
We are thrilled to deliver to fans exciting and engaging content that has the intensity they have come to expect from the franchise.”
That’s one heck of a lot of map packs – so expect Call of Duty: Black Ops to get a bundle at one point or another. Hopefully it will be slightly cheaper that the Modern Warfare 2 packs. Please Activision?
toutski
With figures like this I can only see the price point increasing. Pity.
Oh and cue the haters…
Mikiyaru
i wouldnt think so. i mean if actiblizz raised the price on games doing well, then warcraft would be about 50 quid a month by now right? besides warcraft is already rolling in over 100mill from subs alone :)
Mikiyaru
per month that is. thats over a billion a year from subs, and apparantly the micro transactions arent doing too badly either
asoccer
Not hating, personally I love the Call Of Duty Games, own and purchased all the DLC from MW 1 W@W MW2. Loved the first dlc map pack and so did a lot of other people
tonycawley
In what way is the franchise unique? 20 million copies at a tenner a pop, that’s a lot of money right there. So why exactly do they need to introduce a subscription model? Sounds like they’re doing alright to me.
ericzap
They’ve emphatically denied any notion of a subscription service, don’t take what analysts say as fact.
toutski
Robert Bowling and Dan Amrich have denied it. I bet Kotick would still like a slice of that pie though and he is the boss after all.
ericzap
True that he said that he’d like a subscription service, the (supposed) slime that he is. But the rumors have been denied by other higher ups.
MegaBonez
It’s unique, because it’s the only FPS franchise that’s horribly overpriced.
cc_star
If it was overpriced it wouldn’t sell by the boat load.
cc_star
Proof, right there, that when people said their stuff (either with higher than average RRP or map packs) was too expensive, it obviously isn’t.
Sounds just about correctly priced to me.
MrBilly
Well said, although i’d never take the leap for such an expensive array of map packs there are obviously millions out there that happily will and have!
If there are a market for COD’s expensive RRP’s why would Activision feel they need to lower them?
BrendanCalls
Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, or put another way, One mans rubbish is another man’s treasure.
cc_star
Its business. You can only charge what the market will support.
Take PS3 games as an example, Online you can only charge £35-£40 for a couple of weeks before the sales dry up, retailers then drop the price to £23-£30 and the sales pick up.
The market decides the price, it happens with every single product or service we buy, business’ cannot charge more than people are willing to pay else they won’t be in business very long.
djhsecondnature
Well… it probably sold less being at the price point that it is than say half of that but that’s no surprise.
If those that said it was too expensive didn’t buy it, then it was too expensive surely? Just not to everyone.
djhsecondnature
Re-reading that I have no idea what my point was. Oh well.
cc_star
What if they’d charged a penny for it, would they have sold some more copies… of course they would – would they have seen as big a return on their investment. No way.
They got the sweet-spot for big sales and big money, therefore priced it correctly for its market.
djhsecondnature
Oh not disagreeing there. Just saying, it can be priced correctly for the market but still be expensive for most…
Amphlett
cc_star – I totally agree and as much as we all hate him, Mr Kotick has done a super job in steering the company and franchise on to be such a financial and critical success. Just like Alex Ferguson, I hate him but also have to tip my hat to him.
cc_star
Yeah, deffo.
Mikiyaru
War – what is it good for? Getting loads of MONEH!
STILLCANTTHINKOFAGOODPSNNAME
all jokes aside that is spot on, quite pathetic really
djhsecondnature
It’s over all three games though… and there’s six maps packs. There’s around 27 million Call of Duty (4+) players in the world. Assume that most that bought one pack would have bought them all, that (rounding up) 4 million people buying packs, which is 15% of players. How does that compare to say Killzone, Gears or Uncharted?
djhsecondnature
It’s actually far higher for the number of players. The 20 million maps includes PC apparently. No idea what the sales of the three games on PC are but it’ll shoot that users number up and as a result lower that percentage of uptake.
djhsecondnature
I’ve been told they also released 3 map packs for both CoD 2 and 3. If this is the case, 20 million across 12 maps packs doesn’t look nearly as good.
cc_star
No, perhaps it’s too expensive ;)
Actually I wonder what percentage of initial unit sales purchase DLC and how that compares to other franchises like you mentioned above.
CoD has a much longer tail than Uncharted2 (except for the committed core) so it would probably be fair to suggest that they’d be more likely to buy DLC, given the millions of gaming hours
Its a shame the companies are so secretive because it would be interesting
djhsecondnature
I mean it may be that 8 million of those sales are for MW2, but then surely they’d gloat about it? *shrugs* The statistician inside of means cries out for these figures!
Apnomis
So they have made ~£200,000,000 revenue from online users of COD? That sounds like a fair return for offering server-side match making capabilities to me, so the introduction of subs on top of DLC would just be pure greed – how much are the COD hardcore willing to have milked out of them before they decide enough is enough?
Clearly the DLC model works, and works without alienating casual COD players through subscription fees, and if it ain’t broke why try and tinker with it? Keep the subs for persistent server hosted online worlds and leave the P2P online games as DLC funded, I refuse to believe it costs them that much to run anyway…
stingraz
“delivers one of the best multiplayer experiences ever.”
It’s a shame the single player’s rubbish – they could’ve had themselves a good game.
stingraz
(on mw2)
nemesisND1derboy
With Treyarch stating there will be map packs in 2010, 2011 and 2012, those sales will only get higher…