Call of Duty: Elite

» see callofduty.com/elite as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

two million people were paying fifty dollars a year to look at their own statistics. that is the number worth keeping about call of duty: elite, a service activision launched on 8 november 2011 alongside modern warfare 3 and switched off at ten in the morning pacific on 28 february 2014. it tracked lifetime performance across call of duty games and ran the clan system on top of a shooter that already had ten million people inside it. the premium tier cost 49.99 dollars a year, charged on top of the sixty dollars the game itself cost.

the first night did not work. modern warfare 3 had the largest opening day any game had had to that point, and the service attached to it could not carry the weight. beachhead studios locked out everyone on the free tier and kept them out until 1 december, three weeks later, while the console app went on dropping connections. paying customers got in first. that was the design, but it had not been the sales pitch.

by 31 march 2012 there were ten million registered accounts and two million paid ones. gamestop sold six hundred thousand memberships as a boxed item off a shelf. then black ops ii arrived in november 2012 and elite came bundled free with it, no subscription anywhere, which is the point at which the product stopped being a product. a pc version was still being promised as late as march 2012.

in the years elite was alive i was in ankara and in my late twenties. the shooter culture i came out of was internet cafe counter-strike between 2002 and 2005, where you paid by the hour for the machine itself and the hourly rate covered everything on it. an annual fee to see your own scoreboard would have been a joke in that room. paying for the numbers on top of paying for the game is a console habit and a dollar habit, and it did not travel.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the wall street journal published the existence of elite before activision was ready to. it was shown at e3 in june 2011 and then given a full reveal at call of duty xp, a two-day convention activision ran for its own game in los angeles on 2 and 3 september 2011. six thousand people came. there was a million-dollar tournament, and a paintball arena laid out as the scrapyard map from modern warfare 2 with a working burger town standing next to it. the beta had already opened on 14 july on xbox 360 against black ops, and playstation 3 invites started going out on 17 september.

the pitch underneath all of it was that a shooter with tens of millions of players had no memory. your record vanished with each annual release and there was no way to run a clan except through other people's software. elite was activision noticing that xfire and the forums were doing work the publisher was not being paid for.

~ the decline ~

what the fifty dollars actually bought was the season of content: twenty-four drops of downloadable material across 2012, opening with the liberation and piazza maps on xbox 360 on 24 january. the rest of the offer was elite tv, which was video, and pro analysis, which was advice. strip the social layer away and the object underneath is a season pass with a magazine attached to it, priced at fifty dollars while other publishers were selling plain season passes for less.

so the wrapper had to come off. making elite free with black ops ii in november 2012 fixed the value question by removing the price, and it left activision running a large piece of infrastructure that generated no revenue at all. a free service inside a company that measures things quarterly has a short remaining life.

~ what really happened ~

the closing notice went out in the last week of february 2014 and the site went dark on the twenty-eighth at ten in the morning pacific. the clan systems inside modern warfare 3 and black ops ii died with it, because they had never been in the games, only pointed at the service. anyone who had logged in since 1 january got two hours of double experience points in ghosts. that was the settlement.

activision said there were no plans to bring elite back and that its most-used parts had been moved into the games themselves, which was accurate. ghosts shipped with clans built in and a free companion app on phones. the honest reading is that elite was a paid beta test of features that ended up as table stakes. the customer funded the test, and what the test produced was later folded into the price of the disc.

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