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UPDATE: Call Of Duty Paid Membership Plan Caught On Tape?

by Jeff Cork on Jul 19, 2010 at 12:40 PM

UPDATE: Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling has responded via Twitter to the video circulating the Internet seemingly indicating a paid subscription model for Call of Duty.

Bowling's Tweet: Modern Warfare 2 subscription plan rumors going around. For the record, nobody has to pay to play COD or MW2 multiplayer, nor will they.

ORIGINAL POST [July 19 2010 12:30 PM]: Well, it looks as though Activision might be doing more than merely thinking about adding a subscription model to its successful Call of Duty franchise. If a video from 360 Junkies is to be believed, such a framework is already in place.

According to the clip's description, a player was trying to join a friend's game in progress and got a peek at a little something extra. A screen says "No memberships are available at this time. Please try again later," under a Modern Warfare 2 Memberships heading.

Earlier in the month, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick claimed that as many as 60 percent of Xbox Gold members paid for the service specifically to enjoy online Call of Duty matches. He voiced his dismay with Microsoft, saying "We don’t really participate financially in that income stream. We would really like to be able to provide much more value to those millions of players playing on Live, but it’s not our network."

What do you think? Is the video legit? Does it make sense for Activision to try to make even more money from the Call of Duty franchise?