PC PC GAMES

Activision Must Start Charging for Call of Duty Online Play, says Pachter

Following the recent NPD sales report, which revealed software sales plummeting 15% for the month of June, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter tried to figure out exactly what the heck has been going on. June marks the fourth negative month of decline this year, but why?

Pachter said part of the problem stems from Nintendo now bundling two games in with the Wii, and many consumers buying clearance software with their new, cheaper Xbox 360s. The bigger issue, however, is the rise of online multiplayer gaming, which obviously gives any game more replay value, which in turn means that those players are less inclined to go out and buy new software.

“…we think that the overall decline was due to a very large number of people playing multiplayer online games for free on PlayStation Network, and for an annual fee with unlimited game play on Xbox Live,” Pachter noted. “We estimate that a total of 12 million consumers are playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for an average of 10 hours per week on the two platforms’ respective networks, and the continued enjoyment of this game (along with an estimated 6 million Halo online players, 3 million EA Sports players, and 5 million players playing other games, such as Battlefield, Red Dead Redemption, Left 4 Dead and Grand Theft Auto) has sucked the available time away from what otherwise would be spent playing newly purchased games.”

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Technical difficulty caused this podcast to be late by a couple days. Sorry for that folks. Let me know if you have any issues from here on out.

We got together a day late since we all still recovered from the LAN. We had a lot of fun, sorry you had to miss it! If you never been to a LAN see if you can find a place local to you. Yes, you will meet some strange folk, but you can also make some great friends.

Here are the other things we talked about:

• Dragon Age DLC
• TF2 new updates
• ARMA2 and Operation Arrow Head 
• Blizzard Real ID issues and resolution
• Just Cause 2 MultiPlayer?!
• Apple
• Dragon Age 2
• WOW slowly waining even with the core
• NVIDIA GTX460
• Our Multi-Core CPU predictions
• Josh wants my 30″
• Physx not working on purpose?
• Racing Game promise
• Due WhiteOut wins! (Josh Rejoyced)
• Friends don’t let Friends hate on themselves!
• Game Giveaway NEXT WEEK!

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So we are in my basement (Lan Central) and Fascinator is already providing much much too much entertainment. There must be a way to settle this boy.
We had the first injury time out (BigJoe got a monster cramp in his leg and we had to substitute him out of  the game).
And when a random French guy joined us at FlatOut, American dominance was demonstrated by a group hug on top of Mister Frenchie.

Anyway, this post will have all media we grab at the LAN. Click Read more and you will find updates throughout the weekend. So here we go:

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:33:51 — 26.9MB)

Will is taking a commanding lead in being part in all sorts of BETA’s. Funny, since he is the guy with the least time among us. And so it is that we talk quite a bit about Beta game-play, what is new, what is coming up and what we are looking forward to. I can seriously see us picking up LOTR once it goes free to play. I can’t wait to see what the pricing structure will look like.

Here is what else we talked about:

• Lord of the Ring Online Free to play Beta
• ARMA2: Operation Arrowhead
• Josh builds a Monster System, and then some
• HP EVNY17 Heat issue FAIL
• Cryptic is loosing their Executive Producer (In how bad a shape is StarTrek Online?)
• Super Heroes all sorts of MMO’s
• Metal of Honor Beta Impressions
• New laptop pet peeves
• Some Apple talk (Don’t hold it wrong… and then some)
• StarCraft 2 is not very much off
• NVIDIA 3D implementation, a listeners question

This is the first time I’ve built myself a really awesome machine. I’ve always built my own machines but usually not to this degree. Quite a few of the parts are in the picture above, the Asus Rampage III Extreme motherboard, G.SKILL Ripjaws 24GB Ram (DDR3 1600), Silverstone 1000W PSU and the i7-930 processor.

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Talked in the last podcast about the Beta. I and the Fascinator like it so far. You can tell it has a little while to go, but so far so good. Let’s hope they make the best of it!

I have made not secret out of my love afair with Company of Heroes. Call me crazy in love or just crazy, but this game is still the best RTS out there. Easy to play, hard to master. Something here for anyone. Now you can find out how much truth or untruth I have spoken. For as just a little more than your lunch money you can buy CoH Gold. The pack that includes everything. So what are you waiting for. Go get it!