The launch of Modern Warfare 3 has been a huge success – no surprise – because it broke first day gaming sales by a huge margin. We have word that the latest Call of Duty game made around $400 million in revenue on its opening day. Most movies cannot make that period; as such the franchise is now far bigger than most blockbuster movies. With the game having so much success, how come the services surrounding it were not ready?
Those of you who wanted to get in on the action early signed up for the CoD Elite service, but found that from the outset there were server issues. This has led to questions being asked concerning dev readiness and if users should have more patience? This is my Joystick has made a point of saying that Call of Duty fans are unhappy with paying Activision yet more money, but they have to remember that in the annual price you will get all DLC for a year. Now to most users this is an amazing deal, but for those who don’t play much online will not even bother with Elite.
However, many gamers opted to purchase the Hardened Edition of Modern Warfare 3, as this gave them access to Call of Duty Elite in with that price. However, we already know that on the day the service was due to go live they were met with a password error, which meant that they could not use the service they paid for.
Activision did update us as to what was going on, as well as offering 30 days of free access to Elite. But it still baffles us as to why they were not ready, but are we being too hard on them? Even though this is the biggest game franchise, could they ever be prepared to be hit by millions of users all at the same time? We have seen services go down before, and they have far less online activity than a Call of Duty launch. Maybe we should give Activision the benefit of the doubt here, and just sit back and be more patient?
