Activision, Infinity Ward and Treyarch all piled on for a collective denial yesterday that a "Call of Duty" video contains evidence of a plot to charge for playing online. In fact, despite CEO Bobby Kotick's public admission that he "would have Call of Duty be an online subscription service tomorrow" if he could, representatives from all three offices shot down the speculation as rumor, and Infinity Ward creative strategist Robert Bowling even went as far as to use the word "never."
"There is not, and will never be, additional fees required to subscribe and play 'Modern Warfare 2' multiplayer," Bowling wrote on his blog at FourZeroTwo.com.
Likewise, Activision social media manager Dan Amrich, called the video a "glitch" and denied that any such plans for an additional subscription-based service were in the works for "MW2."
"This video shows just a glitch — since you can access a Live subscription renewal from within the MW2 game interface, it appears some data got jammed between two parts of Live," he wrote on his One of Swords blog. "It's not a secret portal to some nefarious plot to charge people for COD multiplayer — and there are no plans to do that."
Lastly, Treyarch community manager Josh Olin chimed in on Twitter, probably hoping to put potential "Black Ops" pre-orderers' fears at rest about the CoD series' next installment.
"No, you will not have to 'Pay to Play' #CODBlackOps Multiplayer either. Rumor -> Squashed," he explained.
That's about as comprehensive a denial as you're liable to see anywhere in the video game industry this year. Activision also gave an official statement to IGN that more or less restates what all three of these guys said. Their responses do paint Kotick's comment to The Wall Street Journal into a strange place, though. It looks like his dream model will be getting applied to another game or not at all, unless Activision changes its mind down the road, of course.
Are you glad to know that Activision doesn't want to introduce subscription fees to "MW2"? Are you surprised by the three-pronged response? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.