Swordfish Pond

The head cheese at Activision, Bobby Kotick, recently made headlines for his assertion that, in order to compete properly with World of Warcraft, publishers may need to invest nearly a billion dollars in such a venture. Fortunately for Kotick and crew, they now have access to the big brains at Blizzard and Vivendi, a group of folks who know quite a bit about the MMO business. How then, can Activision exploit its biggest earners into even bigger financial monsters?

The Activision CEO says that during the first few months of integration planning with Vivendi, they asked themselves some serious questions about what they consider “the fastest growing markets in the world”, including Asian markets and MMOs.

As an example, Kotick said to investors at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, “What would be the natural evolution of a property like Call of Duty into a massively-multiplayer environment and how do you monetize that?”

Kotick parlayed that into a thought on in-game advertising, in which he pointed to Starcraft as a model for short-session, ladder tournament play that can easily support ad spots. While a Call of Duty MMO may be a long way off, if it ever gets off the ground, it’s starting to sound like Activision execs may be giving it serious thought and we’d expect it to be a big focus for the publisher’s ad revenue model.

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I really don’t see the point of this , honestly.Isn’t the Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer , Multiplayer enough?
It already has the ranking system , the level and experience system and unlockables.
So what are they planning? Maybe a huge world like any other mmorpg where you can run goallessly killing terrorist mobs , do quests involving killing mobs and invading Iraqs Caves and buildings and maybe , just maybe a Raid where you do fun PvP action doing a 5 minutes ( tops ) shootout?
And can you image what the gear system would be like?

Strogenov killed Iraqian Terrorist
Iraqian Terrorist dropped [ Iraqian Helmet ]

Apperently there’s a new MMOG coming soon after 5 years in the making , called My Freaky Creatures.
There’s not so much information given free about it , but after reading some articles about it it’s going to be some mix of Pokemon and Battle beasts and Medabots, which let’s you put together your own creature you purchased, on a flash drive in store and each flash drive contains 2 or 3 creatures to unlock, together with 20 random parts and powers to pick from.
And aside from that there’s a Tamagotchi/Monster Rancher-like thing to it ,choosing a location for your creature and let it live in a cave, dungeon or wherever , and feed , give toys and other things to keep him happy.

There are 5 types of attacks , physical, energy, poison, fire, and ice. Once both initial attacks are chosen, you can choose to employ a Power, which modifies your chosen attack. If, for example, you see that your opponent’s attack is energy-based, you might choose to use your energy shield Power to mitigate its effects. So, the initial attack is blind, the secondary attack is with full knowledge of what’s coming at you. Once both of these attacks have been chosen, they’re played out with amusing and charming animations.