It has been speculated by Pachter and other analysts that the Call of Duty franchise need be monetized further to maximize shareholder gains on the success of the popular shooter. Eric Hirshberg flat out denied the speculation of Activision ever charging for Call of Duty multiplayer. Hirshberg clarified:
“He’s probably looking at meta-trends in the world and in culture about online services and new ways things should be monetized from Netflix to cloud-based computing. …But at the end of the day, all I’m trying to get across is I can unequivocally say we will never, ever charge for the multiplayer.”
Which in all reality is the best solution. It might not be the best way for the publisher to maximize revenue for any specific title, of course it would generate more profits to the bottom line if a subscription was required for CoD. But, how many people would leave the franchise if this becomes the case? The pure and simple rationale behind buying any Call of Duty game is that it provides many hours of enjoyment and is a well developed franchise. When you take into consideration that many of the game’s players on the Xbox 360 already pay for a subscription based service to play online, you start to see that the beef that shareholders should have is with the middleman and not the consumer. Patcher defined Hirshberg’s statements as a betrayal by saying:
“Considering that each of the publicly traded publishers exists to maximise shareholder value, we view their reticence to monetise multiplayer as a betrayal of shareholder trust, and can only hope that each implements plans to address the impact of increasing free multiplayer going forward.”
- This article was updated on July 24th, 2021
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