Call of Duty Elite Officially Revealed

Call of Duty Elite Officially Revealed - Video game’s company, Activision has finally revealed Elite, a new social layer for its wildly popular Call of Duty games. Elite was designed to unite the massive community of Call of Duty players as well as provide tools to help gamers of all levels improve their skills.

Call of Duty Elite is a hybrid stat-tracker/social network for the online shooter series that will become available this summer. The service is available on web browsers, consoles and mobile apps and will work with all future Call of Duty games, including Black Ops, the most recent game in the series. Elite features four main sections: Career, Connect, Compete and Improve.

The basic service will be free, but some features will require a premium subscription. While Activision has not laid out exactly what extras will come with a fee attached, some Call of Duty players have taken to the web to protest what they see as a cash-grab by the makers of the best-selling videogame in the United States.

The service will launch in full along with Modern Warfare 3 in November, but a beta is already open for use with Black Ops. Elite is largely free, though a premium membership is needed to get full functionality. That membership also includes all downloadable content released in the future, but it still might be a little pricey for the casual user.

VideoGamer.com went hands-on with the service last week and detailed what potential subscribers will be getting for their money.

Elite is a 'no-brainer'

“Call of Duty Elite represents the next big step in finding a way to gouge more money out of gamers’ wallets,” Philip Hansen, who runs gaming website Evil Avatar, said in an e-mail to Wired.com.

Some gamers see it as an attempt to charge an additional fee for features that are often available in online multiplayer games for free, such as social-networking groups and detailed tracking of in-game statistics.

“It is out of pure greed and lack of respect for their community that Activision has decided to charge a subscription fee for the content to be provided under Call of Duty Elite,” The Gunn Shop wrote on its YouTube page. “Services that other developers offer for free. Make it free, or GTFO!”