Think about how many people bought the CoD map packs. There's your value add. A new map every month and occasional new play modes. Is it worth it? I don't know. Will millions of people pay it? Yes.

The big draw with subscription model games in general is asset building. There are X many levels and demons and magic items to be won in World of Warcraft. The world is of vast value.

The same cannot be said of Call of Duty though. Its attraction as a game is both single player, and multiplayer, but if playing for multiplayer the main draw is skill training (i.e. getting better) in a limited landscape. Money spent does not translate into assets built. And just how big is the divide between singles and multis?

XBox Live shows that FPS content is monetisable in an online fashion, but its Gold subscriptions are cross game and comparatively really cheap. It is conceivable that Activision could roll all of their online games up in a similar fashion (although how practical I don't know) but single games? It didn't really work out for Planetside did it?

"If the value offered to them is adequate to the admission required through some form of ongoing payments"
This is the key. I don't know what options there will be in the future, but right now, I can play a dozen other shooters online for free; I can find a number of used games for under $15 and get dozens of hours of gameplay out of them if I wanted; I can pay whatever I want for a Humble Indie Bundle; or, I could just go back and play one of the other dozens of games I already own on an older system. Therefore $15 for 5 maps is not appealing to me, nor is a subscription multiplayer when I have so many better options.

Hmmm, more reason for me to personally care less about shooters. It will be interesting to see what the market thinks. I see this as a Napster-iTunes sort of thing. I don't doubt that the Kotick-types of our industry will make it so. They will. The interesting thing is to see what happens. The Napster analogy goes like this: it's the late 90's and if you have a computer with a decent hard drive, speakers and perhaps a CD drive then you "found" this cool "free" music through Napster. RIAA was (perhaps rightfully) outraged and reacted rash and impulsively attacked its customers with lawsuits, computer viruses and so forth. Then along came this computer software/hardware company called Apple and the iPod and iTunes. They were the ones to really get people to start buying music again, but with DRM. Many consumers hate DRM, and we all know that pirated media do not have DRM. Anyways, long story short, RIAA got excessively greedy punished its consumers and flash forward to now --- they're on the path to extinction. It has gotten so bad now that even I, a musician and avid fan of many types of music, can't remember the last time I paid for a recording or big concert. And it's not because I pirate --- it's worse --- it's because I just don't care about any of it.

The last thing we need to do as an industry is sap our consumers' desire by extorting funds and/or punishing them. Just because film and music are on the decline too, doesn't mean people are going to stick with games. Give them a reason to leave and they will find something else to spend disposable entertainment dollars on.

From a business side, sure the optimal company gets regular easily quantifiable payments (and preferably up front, which may mean before dev even starts in our case). But I've never seen a purely textbook "optimal" company. Like everything real, there are flaws. At the end of the day, what matters most is who you are doing it for and why. Are you doing it to plate your toilets with gold? Or are you doing it to invest more profits in your company? Are you doing it to pay your workers better or afford them a better quality of life? Or perhaps you are doing it for the main reason people do business... to better meet their customers' desires.

No, plain and simple - If it is not an MMO you do not charge a monthly fee especially when it is on a console for Christ sake. Map packs and DLC is the way to charge people to continue to play an non-MMO FPS game online for PS3 or Xbox 360, and the same goes for PC.

Here is another example of a greedy multimillion dollar game publisher looking to make more money when they do not need it b/c WoW makes them their bread and butter, and so will Blizzard's next MMO! The upcoming DUST 514, a MMOFPS for yes consoles, I can understand why they will charge a monthly fee. ITS AN MMO!!!! Giant servers, huge open worlds with expanding areas, lots of a gamers on one server, lots of content (quests, items, upgrades, markets, etc.), future expansion packs, and you get to play with the PC EVE Online players.

They want to charge monthly subscriptions for CoD: Black Ops let's say, then you better make it so that the servers can handle multiple teams or individuals (Over 5,000) with multiple guns firing, explosions exploding, air strikes and gunships firing without the frame rate dropping once. And you better have all the weapons and firearms in the world from USA to China to South Africa, and have people do more than just run and gun or snipe in a sever all day long. Let's have quests, raids, PvE, PvP, and of course the gay CoD clans or guilds if you will. ;)

We are already paying 300-600 dollars for the console, 60 dollars for the game (some pay up to 150 for collector editions), 50 dollars for the Xbox Live Service fee, our Broadband internet bills a month, and now you want to charge a freaking monthly fee to play Quake, Doom 4, CoD: BO, crappy XBLA shooter games, and any other non-MMO games on consoles and PCs! KMA!!!!

The problem with Call of Duty going subscription based is that there are so many other online shooters with practically the same game play these days that people will just switch over. I have spoken to a few of my friends who play Modern Warfare 2 for money in small tournaments, and every one of them has said that if a subscription service were to come to Black Ops or future Call of Duty games then they would just find a new game. The competition is just too tough for Activision to get greedy at this point. As has been stated above, I believe map packs and DLC are the way to go.

I'm not a fan of console shooters though, so this won't really affect me.

All I can say is that if it came down to this, I better get content every single month I pay for something worth the price. I'm not paying for patches to fix a game.

DLC works just as fine. If you can't pump out enough DLC, what makes you think you can pump it out every month to warrant a sub?

I'll cite the fairly specific example of APB as a subscription based game (of sorts) that didn't do well because the core mechanics were fairly simple. You basically had about six or seven mission types that were all variants of death match, capture the flag, and zone control (which is kinda of the same as capture the flag). The world did provide for players jumping in at any point to the matches and allowed for incredible customization of the characters, heck they even had an interesting means of paying for your time in the game that players could more easily customize to their level of time investment in the game.

The systems surrounding the core mechanics were all really innovative and showed a lot of forward thinking that would easily help any MMO expand their user base to the point of running at profit. However, the game's base mechanics, story, and world were completely stark. The world was populated by blank slate characters that spout purely expository information unless they were just a walk cycle wandering the streets aimlessly. Nothing about the world felt like it was actually alive, just a backdrop for player versus player action.

That's all a First Person Shooter has going for it too in terms of multiplayer. Any bots created are likely just going to mimic players in terms of effectiveness and still be mostly unable to adapt to specific play styles to the point of them being unable to prove a challenge for long compared to skilled humans and what else can be added to a subscription based game that couldn't be reproduced by a fan community using mod tools?

I can see the value to companies in getting a larger return on the increasing costs of game development, but it really has more costs than that since the team is likely going to be pared down by their corporate overlords (again citing ABP for this) in order to run at maximum profits. At best if wildly successful, will cause the creative leads for the game to get bored and leave the company to make something different instead of adding content to the same game for years (see Blizzard).

It's ultimately going to lead companies in a direction that most won't want to go, even if the players massively support it.

If Activision wishes to charge a monthly fee for the use of Battle.net then I will be one of the ones who no longer plays games from Blizzard.

Free to play games already provide the periodic content and services that people here are mentioning they might pay a sub for. If these guys really want to charge for the game and charge a sub on top of that, they'd better go way beyond what the f2p guys are doing.

I know the stigma surrounding f2p games on these comment sections, but if you really examine what these guys are doing with their services, it's pretty crazy that these FPSs are free.

If they think they can get people to pay subscriptions for what they were getting included in the price tag before, they don't realize how playable and fun the hundreds of previous shooters are. I think the concept is simply not marketable. (unless we're talking about a large MMO-FPS-RPG) Otherwise, people are going to be going back to CoD4, CS:S, BF2, TF2, or a competitors new game taking advantage of this huge mistake. (go NS2!)

Either charge people money for each DLC... ($5 or so)
Or if you're going to do a subscription model, release new content equivalent to a DLC every month...

But anyone who doesn't charge a monthly fee and releases new content for free is going to have a definite advantage over all of these greedy ass motherfuckers.
It's really not a viable concept that anyone smart would warm up to, unless you have a persistent world MMO RPG FPS.

That's why I'd rather play Counter-Strike Source than Modern Warfare 2...

Lets see:
Subscription fee for broad band internet 50$/month
Subscription fee for XBoxLive 30$/year
Price of the console Several hundred
Price of 1 console game 60$

Plenty of room left to fleece? Charging more for less and less. /sigh

My biggest qualm about subscription based gaming is that it encourages the player to pick a game and stick with in for at least a month at a time. A player who plays for only a week and quits feels that he is getting shortchanged compared to someone who plays for the whole month. Rather than appreciating the experience of that game, for whatever length it was fun, the player will feel cheated because other people are getting more time/enjoyment out of it [Additional reading on the topic: Matthew 20:1-16]. As someone who plays a new game every day (most of them free or old enough to be on GOG) sticking to a game for a whole month feels bizarre and restraining. I'm the type who will go back to an unfinished game every three months for a couple days and make progress, but subscription games don't offer me that freedom.

If subscriptions could be purchased by both month or lump sums of game time (by the hour), then we'd be getting somewhere. Then I could buy some time and have it for when I wanted it, while hardcore players could get the better deal ($/hour) of the monthy subscription. I feel that the issue with me is the granularity of the subscription options, not the overall concept of paying to play.

I don't believe that the current model can be used and simply adding a subscription fee for online multi-player. There definitely has to be a value add. A new offering that comes from the billing of a subscription. Patching and content are not necessarily sufficient, as these are offered today, and at a less cost.

If a customer is buying a game for $60 and then paying $5 per month to play after 12 months their investment is $120 in a single title. If a DLC pack is $15 then you essentially would need to produce sufficient content to make at least 4 DLC packs within that 12 month period continually to supply a user with enough content to justify a $5 subscription.

That's a lot of content to produce, but definitely is in the vein of the MMO model. I am not sure that FPS houses want to devote that much time to consistent content development or not. None of them really talked about that. The questions in this article are not really what I would of asked.

Do they want to hire more people to create a larger amount of content to justify for a subscription? Do they believe the content they currently provide in a DLC format is sufficient for a subscription model? What kind of legs do they think a subscription shooter would have?

Activision, and specifically the COD business model has always been a new game pretty much every year alternating studios. If their lifetime of a game were to change from 12 months to 24 months, then how does their overall architecture change? Do they have more content developers and less programmers? Can an existing studio reallocate their resources to perform this model without significant changes?

A large number of questions to be asked. I definitely do not think any of it is in the line of simply tack on to an existing thing. It is definitely a significant shift in not only the development plan of a project, but a shift in how people work on it, and how it is distributed to customers. That's a lot of effort for a business model change.

Another problem with the subscription based game, from an industry health perspective, is that it's harder for customers to leave a subscription based game and go to (or even try) another. For example, WoW basically has a monopoly on the MMO market (for argument sake anyway), which makes it very hard for other MMOs to come to market successfully. So if other genres started subscription based models, what happens when we get the WoW of FPS's and lots of devs start going out of business because the majority of the FPS community is playing that ONE FPS (and no one is leaving because 1) they pay monthly for it and 2) everybody they know is playing it)? What's so wrong with having a market where our customers get ready for a different / next game after a period of time? Especially if you're not the dev who's putting out the current best selling game...don't you want that customer base to "get bored" with that current game so that your soon to be released game has a larger market of customers ready to purchase something?

@Evan, "Here is another example of a greedy multimillion dollar game publisher looking to make more money when they do not need it", sorry Evan but that comment demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of capitalism. The value of a good is the price point at which both a consumer is willing to pay for it and a seller is willing to sell it. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," is from Karl Marx. So unless we transitioned to a communist economy while I was at the office, the profit motive is still the driving force of companies. If you owned stock in the greedy publisher I'm sure you wouldn't be telling them to lower their prices because they are making too much money.

The advantage of the subscription model, or what I like to call GaaS (Games as a Service), is that it incentivizes publishers to make durable games, rather than games with a lot of hype but only a few hours of game-play. Publishers will also be inspired to invest more in the community and keep multiplayer servers running longer. Hopefully, by reducing pirating, game companies will increase revenue and pass that onto the gamer either by adding content or reducing price. It also means that people pay for what they use. Someone who'd like to play the game but doesn't want to drop $60 on something they may only play for a dozen hours may make the leap if they only have to pay $20. Of course the downside is if you are hard core, you'll pay more. But the upside of that again is the fact that the publisher is more interested in investing in good performing titles meaning regular enhancements and new content for those in-love with the game. I see this as the future across all genre's.

Halo 3 (and, well, Reach) is the only reason I still have a Live account (would have bought MW2 on ps3, not going to pay for something that I can't bring guests online). So 50 a year for free map packs and weapon updates? Probably. CoD is way too fast paced for any lag whatsoever to not be a problem, so if I were to specifically pay for one game's online, I'd want it to be flawless.

No idea why Activision would need to charge yearly again, they already pump out a game a year, by a second tier studio (at least as far as FPSes are concerned), and charge 60 bucks for a 6 hour single player and a multiplayer that is obviously where most of that budget is going to.

If they want to charge 5 bucks a month for an online game with no upfront cost, that gets updated every now and then (including new single player missions), and isn't 'annualized,' then sure, why not.

Sure, Activision charging what they can is capitalism, and there's nothing wrong with that, but they're already using a quasi annual fee model that would need to be destroyed in order for a subscription model to work. Get Treyarch back on Spiderman or Tony Hawk, they're obviously second rate at recreating CoD games. And free up N-Space so they can make on Geist 2 with great Wii control. My God there's a lot of dev talent being missused by the Call of Duty annualization machine...

I will make this simple based on my experience playing and paying for APB.

First Person Shooters have issues with rampant hacking, Cheating, exploiting, and griefing.

Not being able to do anything about the above group of people, because you didn't implement a decent Anti hack, or customer reporting system from the start, does not help your game.

Having so many blatant hackers and cheaters in a subscription based system is bad because:
1) you would end up banning over half you income base.
2) you loose the other the other half because they will not pay to play a game full of hackers.

APB has too many cheaters subscribing to the game. Its clear that there is nothing they can do about it. The hacks out there are undetectable by the anti hack software they use, or pretend to use, no one is sure that software is even active. Non hackers are not re subscribing until something is done about it. New players that are "demoing" the game are not staying.

If your going to make people pay for a subscription on a FPS, you better have your game hack proof. Because you cant ever make a game Hack proof your best bet is to never make a FPS with a subscription base.

Here's a flowering example you may want to watch: Global Agenda. It's a team FPS/MMORPG released close to the start of 2010, the pilot product of Hi-Rez Studios. Originally, they were planning a two-path payment system: you could buy the game itself and access the primary features for no extra cost, or you could also pay a monthly subscription for access to a special Conquest mode (guild vs. guild territorial competition) and nebulous future updates. To drum up business, they gave free access to subscriber features for the first month...then extended that...and extended it again. Recently they said, y'know what, we're not going to charge time-based fees after all, though they do plan to sell expansion packs in the future. I'd be interested to know how well business is going for them and what factors went into their decisions regarding their payment model.

Planning alternative revenue models is not necessarily "scheming", but I suppose you can look at it that way if you want. Of course, then you would have to accuse every person on the planet who is trying to increase their material wealth as "scheming".

MW2 sold what, 20 million copies? Seems there is fun to be had there. The bottom line is that if they don't provide enough value to justify a subscription then a subscription product will fail. Period. This isn't a state-sponsored monopoly industry (yet) so you either provide value and succeed or provide inadequate value and fail. There are plenty of FPS options out there so if CoD becomes onerous then move on.

(I realize I'm over-simplifying a complex market dynamic so don't come at me with the thousand complicating factors like marketing value and hype and distribution channels, et al. It all distills to that simple concept.)

I believe the industry is being too limited in how they look at what features can be offered for a subscription. I have yet to hear of a subscription that allows free download of USER created content. Can you imagine allowing user to create levels for CoD then allowing anyone with a subscription to download that for free? Anyone without a subscription has to pay per level or for packs of levels. Investment by Activision is for Q&A of levels and distribution via download only. Expand what can be offered. Think outside the box. A new level, some skins, and/or a new level cap every 3 to 6 months will not make a subscription worth it. I can't speak for the world of gamers as a whole but if I am paying a subscription I expect weekly patches, updates, events, and minor perks. Then I expect monthly substantial updates and additions. Finally I expect quarterly or bi-quarterly major updates and additions. Once a year or every other year there should be some sort of expansion that maybe requires a small fee of $20 to download $30 from brick and mortar stores. So far MMOs are the only ones that can offer this kind of scalability. Nothing else has been developed to take advantage of offering this kind of value for a subscription.