Since the sub­scrip­tion ser­vice for Call of Duty is now a real­ity, it’s time to take a closer look at what we gamers are get­ting out of it. Of course, Activi­sion Bliz­zard is unable to detail most of the paid fea­tures for Elite because the premium-tier ser­vice was designed to be deeply inte­grated with Call of Duty: Mod­ern War­fare 3. Until we are closer to the launch of the game we have to make do with the scraps the com­pany throws at us.

Call of Duty: Elite is a ser­vice incor­po­rat­ing stats-tracking, social net­work ele­ments, an inter­ac­tive strat­egy guide, and plenty of options for com­pet­i­tive gam­ing. Activi­sion tries very hard to sum Elite up in three words: con­nect, com­pete, and improve. At least it is kind of elab­o­rat­ing on the mean­ing of these three words on the Elite web­site. Suf­fice to say that, in a nut­shell, Activi­sion is not charg­ing for CoD multiplayer.

The Fea­tures

A few days ago, Activi­sion sup­plied the press with a FAQ (PDF, ~183 KB) detail­ing a lot of the free fea­tures and a chart of the free fea­tures. Here’s what we will be able to do with­out opt­ing for the pre­mium service:

• Career stats
• Weapon per­for­mance stats
• Per­sonal leaderboards
• Heat maps
• Upload 30 sec­ond videos to YouTube. The videos are tagged with all play­ers and you will be able to stream and share these clips.
• Online con­fig­u­ra­tion of your load outs plus push­ing them into the game from any linked device.
• Face­book friend import.
• Cross device messaging.
• Study­ing of other player’s profiles.
• Groups (cus­tomized by inter­ests and affini­ties, iden­tify group mem­bers in game, group leader­boards and mes­sage boards)
• Clan sup­port
• Inter­act every­where (web, mobile, console)
• And, of course, there’s more to come

As far as the pre­mium fea­tures are con­cerned, they will be demon­strated over the next few months. For the free beta Elite will work with Call of Duty: Black Ops even though the beta will only offer a num­ber of key fea­tures of the full ser­vice. In other words, Elite will also sup­port Black Ops.

The Long-Term Impact

First of all, two impor­tant facts:

• It will still be pos­si­ble to buy a map pack with­out sub­scrib­ing to the pre­mium service.
• Peo­ple won’t be able to buy pres­tige weapons or levels.

That being said, let’s ignore all the com­plaints for the time being and look fur­ther down the road. Things gen­er­ally stay the way they are but the ser­vice must have some very appeal­ing con­tent. Why shell out $5-$7 a month oth­er­wise? Let’s assume $5 as a given, that’s $60 a year for the ser­vice alone. There are prob­a­bly two map packs – maybe three – each offered at $15. In this case you’d shell out $30 or $15 for the addi­tional ser­vices offered by pre­mium mem­ber­ship. That’s not so bad, isn’t it? Of course, if Activi­sion decides to charge $7 for pre­mium mem­ber­ship, you’d effec­tively pay $39 or $54 for pre­mium mem­ber­ship. Depend­ing on the addi­tional services/content this may or may not be to your liking.

Any­way, Elite is a bold, smart move and almost guar­an­teed to work out. Peo­ple sim­ply will do what their friends do, that’s what we’ve seen with the last two iter­a­tions in the Call of Duty fran­chise. Peo­ple com­plain about the $15 price tag but still they buy the map packs because they want to play with their friends. This snow­ball effect will help build the numbers.

I don’t under­stand how any­body can even think of pay­ing a monthly fee for a first per­son shooter. Sure, it depends on the nature and con­tent of the DLCs but we know from expe­ri­ence that most DLCs sim­ply aren’t worth the money. Espe­cially if you can’t even play the game until the third or fourth patch has been released. So, where’s the incen­tive, Activision?

Nat­u­rally, I’m also inter­ested in what hap­pens after down­grad­ing to a reg­u­lar sub­scrip­tion. Will you still be able to access the con­tent you got while being a pre­mium mem­ber? Finally, I’d like to see how Elite com­pares to Bat­tle­field 3 Bat­tlelog – which will be avail­able for free.