The manufacturers of Humvees are suing Activision over Call of Duty games featuring vehicles which, they say, look an awful lot like their own warcars. AM General claim that these Humvee-lookin’ vehicles violate their trademark and Activision don’t have permission, so they want CoD to knock it off and pay them damages. Their case pivots on several Call of Duty games, including Modern Warfare and Ghosts, featuring warcars which allegedly look close enough to Humvees to fall under their ‘trade dress’ — a type of intellectual property covering what a product looks like — and are sometimes called Humvees by name.

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Look, I don’t want this to be another groundhog day. I don’t want the comments thread to fill up with people going ‘Call of Duty is boring’ and then some other people saying “that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” I just want you to only bother watching this video of Modern Warfare 3′s ‘Spec Ops’ co-op mode if you honestly have a real interest in Modern Warfare 3. If you don’t, stop reading. Why are you still reading? You don’t even care! STOP READING. And don’t you dare> comment. I can delete your words with a single button-click, you know. (more…)

Call of Duty Elite, the social networking/clan-organising thingy for COD multiplayer, got a whole lot of backs up when it was unveiled the other week – the prevailing, Chinese-whispered sense being that we’d be expected to fork out to get the full CoD multiplayer experience. With the waters very much muddied, Activision seem to be in fire-fighting mode – now explicitly stating just what will be free. Activision also reckon that “we believe that the free elements of Call of Duty Elite will be superior to any free service currently on the market.”

Oh, and they just called you a hater.
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It was always going to happen, and now it has. The nature of a corporation is never to sit still and be content with its lot – it’s to forever look to ways to make more money from what it has. (If RPS had a scrap of sense, we’d have launched a couple of spin-offs by now, but a corporation we are not). Activision was never going to let the world’s biggest gaming franchise stay the same size – its duty to its shareholders, and to a far less extent to its employees, is to make its IP as profitable as possible. With several of its divisions and titles recently axed and even WoW subscriptions in decline (by an apparently tiny 5%, but the difference between revenues increasing and revenues decreasing is a fundamental one for shareholder confidence), the publisher is almost required to milk a little more out of its remaining cashcows. On the one hand, you can’t blame them for introducing Call of Duty: Elite, a premium subscription service (though its basic features are free) which adds various community and content goodies to its shooter series’ frighteningly popular multiplayer mode.

On the other hand, it’s hard to not to feel a little dirty about Elite, isn’t it?
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The day has come: Activision has finally introduced Plan B. Plan B is much like Plan A, in that it also involves making an absolute crapton of money out of Call of Duty. This time, it’s called Call of Duty Elite, and it’s a social networking, clan-arranging, video-sharing, stat-analysing online service for COD multiplayer. Some aspects for it will be free; others will involve a paid subscription. The gaming world had a sharp intake of breath this morning, and you probably will too.

There’s an *apparently* leaked YouTube trailer of Elite below, but as I believe the publications who Activision chose to show the service to are under some sort of embargo, you’d better hurry and watch it before it either gets pulled or just posted everywhere else anyway.
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Someone’s getting a) bollocked b) fired c) executed tonight, I’m sure. If Kotaku’s sources are right, basically everything about this year’s Call of Duty has just been blown wide open and revealed to John Q. Public some six months before likely release. It’s Modern Warfare 3 and it’s…
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It is, as you probably haven’t been able to avoid, Black Ops O’Clock at midnight tonight. In time-honoured fashion, I will be shooting some dudes then writing some words about shooting some dudes on the morrow, but ahead of that let’s not forget Call of Warfare Duty 2 Modern, the game the seized the hearts and mind of a hundred billion men. What passion, indeed, it inspires.

None more so than the excitable gentleman below. His commentary is, to use his own vernacular, a biblical piece of work. Straight-up beast, even. (more…)

You know what’s cheaper than paying for something? When it’s free. But no, don’t immediately leap upon this philosophy and turn to a life of crime inspired by my simple question, thus implicating me in your spree and dragging my good name into the mud. Instead why not play Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 this weekend, starting tomorrow, on Steam? Because you might be busy, that’s why not. But otherwise, it seems like a good plan.

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