But it has some intriguing options for improvement, so I won’t always have to play with a big “L” on my forehead. So far, I’ve spent most of my time playing the game and little on the Elite network. With it, I can get a lot more engaged than I already am. It has launched Call of Duty Elite, a hardcore social network for Call of Duty fans. In recognition of that trend, Activision Blizzard has changed its own game to adapt. This game and others like it are played year-round. That’s why Tencent bought a majority stake in Riot Games for nearly $400 million. League of Legends, the multiplayer online battle arena game from Riot Games, has tens of millions of users who are highly engaged in short online battles. As I noted last year, the comparative numbers show that, while casual social games are heavily instrumented and extremely popular, they have a long way to go before they can match the enthusiasm that users have for hardcore online games.Īt the same time, things are different from a year ago. If you look at Zynga’s games on Facebook, where players log in for maybe 10 minutes at a time, the engagement level - the amount of time players spend with a game - doesn’t seem like it’s anywhere near the level in Call of Duty games. This is why it makes sense for Activision Blizzard to put four or five studios to work on Call of Duty at any given time. Even now, six months after the game launched, I can log in at midnight on a weekday and find 150,000 other players online. Nobody has time to play mediocre games anymore, because the big hits suck in all of our time. The pattern among other gamers is similar, and that’s why you see some games scoring huge on the charts while many other medium-ranked games fall flat. I might have played four other single-player campaign games all the way through, had I not been tied up with Call of Duty multiplayer. And that means Activision Blizzard is capturing a significant slice of the available game time for millions upon millions of hardcore gamers. That means multiplayer has significantly extended the amount of time that players are putting into this game. If 5.5 million players have put more time into this game (or have just played better) than I have, those players alone have collectively put more than 245 million hours into it over the past six months. Since I can get points for grabbing flags, that improves my overall ranking on multiplayer. That rank is actually higher than my overall multiplayer rank because I like to play a version of the game called Domination, where you have to capture and defend three flags on a map. In terms of number of kills, I ranked 6,164,044 of all players. My kill-death ratio, therefore, was 0.422. My accuracy rate for shooting was 8.29 percent (yes, they count every bullet). The metrics tell me I was on the winning team 137 times and lost 195 times.

Call of duty modern warfare 3