It was always going to happen, and now it has. The nature of a corporation is never to sit still and be content with its lot – it’s to forever look to ways to make more money from what it has. (If RPS had a scrap of sense, we’d have launched a couple of spin-offs by now, but a corporation we are not). Activision was never going to let the world’s biggest gaming franchise stay the same size – its duty to its shareholders, and to a far less extent to its employees, is to make its IP as profitable as possible. With several of its divisions and titles recently axed and even WoW subscriptions in decline (by an apparently tiny 5%, but the difference between revenues increasing and revenues decreasing is a fundamental one for shareholder confidence), the publisher is almost required to milk a little more out of its remaining cashcows. On the one hand, you can’t blame them for introducing Call of Duty: Elite, a premium subscription service (though its basic features are free) which adds various community and content goodies to its shooter series’ frighteningly popular multiplayer mode.

On the other hand, it’s hard to not to feel a little dirty about Elite, isn’t it?(more…)