A new online service for Call of Duty will give players a massive cache of statistics about their performance in the popular war games and offer social networking features in an attempt to build a community around the critically acclaimed series.
The service, called Call of Duty Elite, will launch this summer and be accessible through the web, game consoles and smartphones, Activision said Tuesday morning. Starting with the current, Cold War-themed Call of Duty: Black Ops and the upcoming Modern Warfare 3, the free Elite service will let players review extensive log files from recent matches to hone their skills. It will also offer standard social networking options like creating an online profile, finding friends to play with, sharing videos online and competing in contests for big-money prizes. A premium version will offer more frills.
Elite is an ambitious strategy to keep players locked into the world’s most popular shooter as social and mobile games suck up bigger and bigger chunks of gamers’ attention.
“In an always-on world, the competition for our players’ time has exploded,” says Jamie Berger, vice president of Activision’s digital business. “Online interactivity and community is critical for us to face that world. It’s what sets apart games with growing audiences from really great games struggling to find an audience.”
Call of Duty is a cash cow for Activision.The NPD research group said in February that Black Ops, the latest Call of Duty edition for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, had become the best-selling videogame in U.S. history, ousting Nintendo’s Wii Play. Activision says more than 30 million people have played a Call of Duty game online this year, with the average player spending a whopping 170 hours per year playing the first- and third-person shooters in the series.
The downside is that Call of Duty is based largely on an aging model for videogame sales: selling customers a $60 box in a retail store every year. Activision has made moves to extend players’ engagement with the games by offering new downloadable game levels at regular intervals, but no single, persistent service married a player to the Call of Duty brand. While World of Warcraft fans aren’t just going to up and leave and play another massively multiplayer world, Call of Duty players could easily decide to switch to a different shooter.
The point of Elite, then, is to attempt to turn millions of casual Call of Duty players into a strong community. The tighter-knit the group, the less chance players will bail.
“This is the Holy Grail for gaming companies — a non-MMO with a subscription model,” says analyst Bill Harris, who blogs at Dubious Quality, in an e-mail to Wired.com. Harris says it is quite likely that Activision’s chief rival, Electronic Arts, will launch a similar service for sports games like Madden NFL in the near future.
For Call of Duty, in-depth statistics about gameplay is the major hook. Players might know their kill-death ratio — a rough measure of skill, the number of times they bite the dust versus the number of times they killed another player — for the last match played. But what’s their kill-death ratio across every Black Ops game they’ve ever played? And how does that compare to their friends’ ratings?
Activision knows. The company’s been tracking every little bit of data about Black Ops since the game launched in November. One of the main functions of Elite will be to show gamers that data in an easily digestible form, and then compare it to everyone they know.
Activision already tracks every little bit of data about Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Players will be able to dump their Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam or Facebook friends lists into Elite and build a network of everyone they know that also plays Call of Duty. They’ll be able to post videos of great matches and moments to YouTube, then tag friends in those videos. And Activision will run tournaments and contests, pitting players against each other for the chance to win prizes.Elite will keep records of gamers’ last few matches played, showing a map with every major conflict point diagrammed — who died, where, what weapon they got hit with, etc. Gamers can examine scraps of data to their hearts’ content. (See the gallery above for examples of Elite’s features.)
What Activision’s banking on is that the ability to see these stats, which it likens to “the back of a baseball card,” will give players even more reason to get home and keep playing to improve their results.
“Gamification,” the act of applying game mechanics to a mundane task, like Foursquare awarding virtual achievement badges for going out to dinner, is gaining traction in the smartphone era. Call of Duty Elite is, in some sense, gamifying gaming.
“Napoleon said that ‘a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon,’” says Dubious Quality analyst Harris. “This is just the marketing version of that truth.” Gamers have proven they will play long and hard for a JPEG of a colored ribbon.
Although the basic Elite service is free, Activision will also offer a premium subscription service with even more features, in hopes of turning a sizable portion of the 20 million people who play Call of Duty every month into a perpetual revenue stream, the same way it rakes in millions off World of Warcraft.
Activision has built an entire studio, called Beachhead, to design and run Elite and provide 24-hour customer service. But the company is playing coy about most everything related to Elite’s premium option. It hasn’t said how much it will cost or what specifically will be included. You’ll be able to join informal “groups” of players with shared interests, but building a formal “clan” of players will be premium only. The bigger contests with major prizes will be restricted to premium members. Elite subscribers will get every future Call of Duty map pack for no extra cost, which is sure to lure in the hard-core fans that already spend extra money to have everything.
Chacko Sonny, studio chief of Beachhead, says Activision expects a lot of buy-in.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of people who say, ‘Hey, you get all these extra features and the [downloadable content]? This makes sense to me. It’s something I do, it’s how I identify myself. Like a golfer, or a cyclist or whatever. It’s worth it to spend my money.’”
Speaking of sports, Activision isn’t the only publisher looking to create a deeper relationship with its customers. Last month at a marketing conference in San Francisco, EA Sports President Peter Moore talked up a “complete social experience,” an upcoming service that would let players create an online profile and track their performance across EA’s range of sports games, from Tiger Woods to Madden. The company has also reportedly sent out surveys to players asking them what sort of extra services they would want in exchange for a recurring monthly fee.
“It’s no longer, ‘Buy Madden 11 and then buy Madden 12 and start from scratch.’ It’s, ‘Buy Madden 11 and take everything you’ve done into Madden 12,’” Moore said, according to GameSpot.
And 13, and 14, and 15, if things go as planned.
