Call of Duty Elite is most assuredly a success, given its 7 million members and 1.5 paying subscribers. However, Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg acknowledged that there were some issues with the launch of the service.
“I hesitate to talk about Elite, because even though we’ve had some early success with the numbers, it’s far from time for us to be doing any victory laps on Elite,” said Hirshberg at the 2012 D.I.C.E. Summit. “We had some technological stumbles at launch and that frustrated some of our fans. We’re still making that right. But if we only talk about the things that go as planned then we miss some of the most valuable dialogue that can come out of this.”
Talking about the inspiration, he said the idea was that, “there’s this massive community of people, all passionate about the same thing, with remarkably few ways to communicate and interact with one another. Overlay that with social network and connecting over digital spaces with the things we’re passionate about is the zeitgeist trend in our culture. We wanted to create a way of unlocking Call of Duty‘s community as a real network.”
Even before launch, there were serious messaging issues. “There was only one problem: we wanted to do a beta. None of the features were going to demonstrable in the beta because they were all tied into the code of Modern Warfare 3 and the beta was going to be Black Ops multiplayer,” noted Hirshberg. “With the launching of Elite we had a marketing Sophie’s Choice. Do we do the beta, which is the right thing to do from a development standpoint, or do we make the best possible first impression, which was probably the right thing to do from the marketing standpoint.”
“We chose to tell people right out of the gate that while the vast majority of features would be free, there would be a premium membership. A lot people thought we should have waited and show people what they get for the premium membership before talking about its existence. But we knew this question about whether it would be free would immediately be asked. We’d be put on the spot. We chose to be transparent and tell people our intentions from the beginning. The words ‘Call of Duty‘ plus the word ‘subscription’ equals ‘unleash blogger hell’,” he recalled.
Dealing with the backlash was “the most painful summer of Google Alerts I’ve ever lived through,” indicated Hirshberg.
Still, the community event Call of Duty XP was a good place to announce the full features and Hirshberg indicates that Elite is headed in the right direction. “Both Elite and XP were both experiments in how willing people are to enter a relationship, to treat it more like a brand or a lifestyle. Like I said, we’re a long way from doing victory laps but we’re in it for the long haul. We made it for the right reasons and believe its’ right for a players and if we get it right we can change the relationship, make the game better and more fun for players.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
