Pachter: Call of Duty is a failure
Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter spoke at the Digital Game Monetization Summit in San Francisco and one of the more shocking statements he made is that in his opinion, Call of Duty is a failure. Why? Because people can play online multiplayer… FOR FREE! Oh the horror!
“I know the game sells billions of dollars. Activision did a bad thing with Call of Duty from a profit perspective. They trained gamers that you can buy a game and play it all year, ten hours a week, forever, and you never have to pay again. You just wait for the next Call of Duty. I promise you there are plenty of people, numbering in the millions, who play one game, which is Call of Duty, and they never stop. That’s just like the people who play World of Warcraft and never stop, yet the World of Warcraft guys are paying $180 a year, and the Call of Duty guys are paying $60. So who’s got a better model? This multiplayer thing being free was a mistake. I don’t think anybody ever envisioned it would be this big. It’s a mistake because it keeps those people from buying and playing other games.”
I think Pachter must have been sleeping the last 20 years. Activision didn’t “train” that multiplayer is free, it has always BEEN free! It wasn’t until MMO’s started appearing that online gameplay became something people would be charged for! And secondly, MMO’s like World of Warcraft are very rare to succeed. WoW indeed has been and still is selling strong, but what about all those other franchises? How many have actually been even nearly as successful as World of Warcraft and how many have been failures? Think about that!
Of course, Mr. Pachter is a financial analyst and as such only thinks about stock ratings, and money. Not about videogames as being fun to play but rather just a commodity that’s created to bring in loads and loads of cash. It’s people like him and their ever-increasing urge to find ways to earn MORE money that lead this world into a full-blown economic crisis. So should we listen to him? Hell no!
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The biggest problem with Pachter is he only sees dollars signs and not a game, and a lot of the current software houses bosses are the same. All they are doing is slowly killing the business of making games. If Patcher was in charge it would already be dead and buried.
it kills creativity, that’s for sure