Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg jokingly announced a new slogan for Call of Duty: Elite today:
Call of Duty Elite: It's not a douche move.
That's as of some time in September when a guy who was rallying people back in the spring to boycott the world's first subscription service for Call of Duty changed his tune. That guy, not Hirshberg, passed that revised judgment.
Hirshberg talked about Elite's rocky road at the DICE Summit out here in Las Vegas. What was supposed to simply be a popular, payment-optional add-on for CoD was a controversial, and well-hated thing in mid-2011. Then Activision explained what Elite entailed—and how much of it would be free for everyone.
This was the heat Hirshberg's team at Activision were getting in the spring.
And this is how it turned in September.
So, yeah, the slogan's just a joke. All's well.
But... funny how he didn't mention that once Elite launched it was a debacle again. Only recently has Activision straightened things out, after a fall full of Elite inoperability.
A rocky road indeed.
UPDATE: Hirshberg did acknowledge the service's rocky launch but believes that Activision has improved the service quite a bit since them in its effort to provide customers the service the company feels its customers deserve. (I apologize for this omission from the original post; I had misheard the end of Hirshberg's talk. He had said, "We still have a long way to go on Elite. But, we are in it for the long haul. We believe we made it for the right reasons and that it's the right idea, for our players. And if we can get it right, we can make the game better, more social, more connected and more fun.")
(You know what else was rough, readers? My photo-taking for this story. Sorry about the blurriness of the lead image!)