It appears Activision Blizzard is considering a potentially controversial new way to generate revenue. During yesterday's quarterly conference call, CEO Bobby Kotick hinted that the Call of Duty franchise will head the way of World of Warcraft and become subscription-based.
Activision Blizzard acts as the publisher of the Call of Duty games developed alternately by Infinity Ward and Treyarch. Though the franchise's latest installment, Modern Warfare 2, was the best-selling videogame of 2009 and generated more than $1 billion in revenue according to the NPD Group, Activision Blizzard still reported a $286 million loss in its fiscal fourth quarter. The loss was due, in large part, to the bottom falling out of the Guitar Hero franchise.
Conversely, Blizzard's World of Warcraft franchise continues to be a cash cow for Activision, raking in $15 subscription fees from a reported 11.5 million people every month.

Put the pieces together and you can understand the company's thinking: a financial loss, an enormously popular franchise, and a proven subscription model that generates a river of revenue. Kotick described the future of Call of Duty this way:
If you think about the success that we've had in other product categories on subscription, you can get a sense of the direction that we want to take that franchise.
World of Call of Duty? Subscription fees on the game's online multiplayer? Kotick had nothing else to say on the matter, though the company did confirm that the next installment in the series is due out late this year.

In the FT interview, Kotick lamented the fact that despite the strong sales of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the publisher saw no additional revenue from the game's continuing popularity on console online environments like Xbox Live. "We've heard that 60 percent of [Microsoft's] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call of Duty," Kotick told FT. "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."

The Activision CEO said the company would "very aggressively" support new gaming hardware being planned by the likes of HP and Dell to better integrate PCs with TVs, saying this would break the Xbox 360 and PS3's "walled gardens with new gamer-friendly PCs, designed to be plugged into the television. PCs have long been used for online play, but PC gaming remains niche when the games industry needs to widen its appeal."