There's been a lot of hmming and hawing on gaming sites about the "beginning of the end," so to speak, of the current Call of Duty model, wherein people buy a new game every year and essentially pay for an update to their multiplayer. This was exasperated by the introduction of Call of Duty Elite, which essentially allows access to "premium content" for a monthly fee.
Why doesn't Activision simply make this the crux of their business plan? Abandon physical media altogether, avoid piracy, and keep the public consciousness away from the idea that CoD games are stale, soulless, purely capitalist endeavours? I mean, they'll still be that, but at least Call of Duty Elite will essentially cater to the people who actually care about these games without shoving the brand in everyone's face all of the time. Clearly there's no lessons to be learned from the launch of CODBLOPS (considering it's the highest grossing video game ever), but why not deliver constant updates to the multiplayer arena (the area that Call of Duty players care about the most) without releasing a new, barely different iteration every year?
Obviously I'd prefer if Call of Duty went away altogether, but the opportunity is there for Activision to avoid the double dipping they're almost certain to do. They're going to be swimming in their piles of cash and it's going to be Gross.