Updated at 4 p.m. Pacific with Kirton’s official job title.

Kathryn Kirton, former senior manager of public relations at Activision U.K., pleaded guilty to embezzling Call of Duty funding to live it up — and was apparently fearless in doing so. Her celebrity lifestyle included an engagement party at an exclusive central London venue, a stay at a luxury hotel with her fiancé, and three designer shopping sprees — and she reportedly invited her boss to the engagement party the company would later unknowingly pay for.

Kirton admitted to using a total of £18,963 ($28,939) of company money intended for funding the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops. Kirton commissioned Frank PR consultant Jamie Kaye to help with the game’s launch. Kaye is also a defendant in the case, and admitted to stealing £5,000 ($7,630) from Activision. At least one of the shopping sprees and the two-night stay at the luxury Bagington House hotel happened in 2010.

GamesBeat reached out to Activision’s PR agency for comment on the matter and will update accordingly.

Kaye made the fraudulent purchases on his company credit card. He later invoiced Activision, which Kirton authorized, charging the money back to the publisher.

One such example, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, included buying £5,506 ($8,402) worth of designer clothes shopping for herself and her then-fiancé, Lee Kirton, on the Frank PR company card. She later authorized the reimbursement of that money to the external PR agency describing it as clothing for a magazine shoot connected with a Call of Duty launch. Prosecutor Kevin Dent said that “the clothes purchased have … nothing to do with Modern Warfare or any such game.”

Activision became suspicious of the charges, and investigators uncovered the fraud in February 2011.

Judge John Hillen of the Blackfriars Crown Court seemed more sympathetic than angry, saying that they were “in a position of considerable responsibility,” but adding that “there was repeat dishonesty over a period of months. There is no doubt your wickedness deserves a severe sentence.”

Hillen didn’t give Kirton jail time, saying that it would have a “devastating effect” on her 2-year-old son. Instead, he sentenced Kirton to 18 months in prison, suspended for two years. He sentenced Kaye to nine months, which he suspended for 12 months. Kaye will also have to put in 80 hours of unpaid work.

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For some time, analysts have been predicting that the Call of Duty video game franchise would run out of steam and fall back down to earth. It has been the fastest-selling franchise for several years now, and sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops II topped $1 billion in the first 15 days of the current season. But based on Activision Blizzard’s statements about the number of hours of multiplayer games that players have banked, it looked like the engagement level had dropped for the title, according to analyst Atul Bagga at Lazard Capital Markets.

But that’s not true, according to data mined from Raptr, the gamer social network with more than 15 million players. Dennis Fong, the chief executive of Raptr, told us exclusively that total playtime to date for Black Ops II is comparable with the last two Call of Duty games released. The data are significant because Call of Duty is the biggest $60 video game franchise on earth, and predictions about how well it is doing have affected Activision Blizzard’s multibillion-dollar stock valuation.

“So contrary to various reports that this year’s game is in significant decline, it looks like it’s holding up very well,” said Fong.

During the first three days after the launch of Black Ops II this year, the total multiplayer playtime was 8 percent lower than last year’s Modern Warfare 3, according to Raptr. But it was 42 percent better than the original Call of Duty: Black Ops from 2010. And this year, Activision Blizzard has been more active about promoting higher engagement with the multiplayer community than it has been in the past. You could say it is doing that out of weakness, but the results are pushing the engagement above previous levels.

In the second week after the launch of Black Ops II, playtime spiked higher than in any past games. So after the first two weeks post-launch, playtime was 17 percent higher for Black Ops II versus Modern Warfare 3. Activision gave fans a “Double XP” weekend, where they earned more points for playing. On top of that, Black Ops II benefited during that time because it included the Thanksgiving Black Friday that elevated overall playtime.

Those two factors were absent with Modern Warfare 3, which launched two weeks before Thanksgiving. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around in 2011, Modern Warfare 3 playtime had already begun to decline. Black Ops II sales benefited from a higher number of Black Friday deals, and Activision had never done a Double XP weekend so early before. It has used the Double XP events to get players reengaged with the multiplayer game or help generate awareness for a new map pack.

“Perhaps Activision realizes that community engagement activities planned early actually increases Call of Duty buzz and drives new user acquisition,” said Fong. “This spike in activity will level out as we move further past the launch phase, but early signs is that Black Ops II’s playtime activity is settling within a typical range of activity for Call of Duty but better than what Modern Warfare 3 was doing.”

Raptr says that more promotions and community engagement activities are likely to keep playtime above past Call of Duty games, so it’s a bit early to determine long-term effect right now. The new game has a number of ways to keep the community involved, including livestreaming, sharing brag videos on YouTube, and the Call of Duty Elite gamer social network with large numbers of tournaments.

Black Ops II is also doing well based on another perspective that Raptr analyzes. A calculation dubbed “total playtime as a percentage of launch” shows that Black Ops II is holding up significantly better than Modern Warfare 3. In that respect, Modern Warfare 3 did not hold up as well compared with previous games in terms of total playtime as a percentage of launch.

Last year’s MW3 eventually settled at 20 percent, compared with launch over the following few months. Previous games were closer to 40 percent compared with launch. One of the big differences this year is that Activision made Call of Duty: Elite, which was a subscription service last year, into a free giveaway for fans.

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Millions of players around the world are playing multiplayer combat in this season’s biggest video game blockbuster, Call of Duty: Black Ops II. But just how many of those players are doing things by rote, playing in the same old style year after year and never getting any better?

I have been one of those players, too lazy to change. And we’re not good for Activision Blizzard, which generates more than billion dollars a year from more than 40 million Call of Duty fans every year. (This year, the game sold more than $1 billion worth in its first 15 days). If you get progressively worse at multiplayer, you’ll drop off sooner and move to another game. Worse yet, you might be so embarrassed at how you play that you never even try multiplayer. Bit by bit, such fan erosion could one day knock Call of Duty off its perch as the fastest-selling game of all time.

That hasn’t happened yet. Its players are still very active. As of earlier this week, fans had played Black Ops II for 178,535,425 hours, and more than 399,835,504,682 shots had been fired in multiplayer. Players had thrown 2,359,330,195 grenades and killed more than 20,132,02,068 enemies. Of those, 1,677,862,824 had been killed with head shots. Call of Duty Elite developer Beachhead Studios tracks and shares the data on every bullet fired. It has figured out that the data itself has created a metagame that makes fans even more competitive.

I’ve played Call of Duty games for years. But this time, I engaged in a serious experiment as I rushed through the single-player game and began multiplayer. I got some expert advice from Treyarch game design director David Vonderhaar. His sensible advice reminded me that I should equip myself better to become consistently faster in order to get the drop on (the much younger) players with faster reflexes. He also suggested equipping myself alternatively for stealth, support, survival, or run-and-gun roles. That was like a basic therapy session on how I could play better, without embarrassing myself.

I’ve continued to play, keeping close tabs on my progress using Call of Duty Elite, the social network that now comes free with the game. And now I received a second review of my tactics from Michael Gesner, the executive producer at Activision Beachhead Studios (maker of Call of Duty Elite), and Jason Ades, a producer at Activision Publishing. I’m sharing their collective wisdom with all of those players who need the help, like me, but don’t get a chance to quiz the game developers. These experts are the front-line in the battle that Activision is fighting to get players to re-engage with Call of Duty.

My track record doesn’t lie (I wish it could)

For those who don’t know the game, Call of Duty: Black Ops II is not a realistic combat simulation. It is set in the year 2025, and some of the weapons, while rooted in fact, are not real. You can run faster in the game than in real life, and you can take more bullet damage. The game is very violent, but it is respectful of  the sacrifice of real soldiers. Activision donates some of the proceeds to veterans causes. The single-player story conveys a mature tale about the horrors of modern war, and it tries to give you a sense of what war is like.

But multiplayer is different. I think of the multiplayer version of the game as a sport. Activision encourages this comparison, encouraging players to create their own competitive clans and participate in league play. And it pays to have coaches in this sport.

The experts reviewed my lousy stats, which are available in an amazing amount of detail on Elite. With Elite, you can log in and go to your career page, which has a host of details aimed at helping you brag about the good stuff and improve your play. The stats come from every session you play. You can drill down on a “heat map,” which shows an overhead view of the level and has a timeline. If you haven’t done this yet, you should go to Call of Duty Elite and check it out. You can see where most of the deaths occurred on the map during the session, and who shot whom. The playback shows you exactly who shot you, the weapon they used, and the positions of the shooter and victim.

If I had recorded some matches, they could have seen the video playback of the match from my point of view. With all of this help, I feel that I’m getting enough feedback to help me get better at the game. And that makes me want to play it longer.

In Black Ops II, after 17.5 hours of play, I have a kill-to-death ratio of 0.74. For every three kills, I die four times. On last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, my kill-to-death ratio was 0.43. That was after 59 hours of play, and it was from playing a mode of multiplayer dubbed Domination, where your team tries to take and hold three flags on the map. I wrote about my Modern Warfare 3 experience here.

As you try to grab those flags, you’re more likely to get killed and less likely to get kills. And on the original Call of Duty: Black Ops, I had a 0.76 kill-to-death ratio after 69 hours of play. I always thought Black Ops multiplayer was easier than Modern Warfare 3, thanks in part to small changes like the radio-controlled car in Black Ops that enabled even the lamest players to get some easy kills.

I’ve become a Lieutenant Colonel III, on level 39 of 55 total, and I score about 136 points per minute in the game. My total score is 141,765. By comparison, the top player in the game has more than 4 million points. I’ve got about 23 hours to go before I hit the top level, or Prestige. I’m actually playing more than I have in the past. I’m also thinking about it more and am starting to use the Call of Duty Elite app for the iPhone, which lets me change my custom classes, or favorite weapon kits.

The stats tell you that the Modern Warfare style of multiplayer is much more difficult and less forgiving for average players like me. But I also feel there are some significant differences with Black Ops II that help equalize the playing field.

The no-brainer tricks I had already figured out

The first 10 levels now have a tutorial that you can play with bots, or computer-controlled characters. You can also watch five multiplayer videos on Elite TV for helpful hints. If you still need help, you can head over to Twitch to watch live Black Ops II games in action. It is mesmerizing to watch players who are really good.

The new Pick 10 system, where you can customize your loadout using 10 points — rather than be restricted to certain choices — is great for people who need to fix their problems with multiplayer fast.

Finding your right game is also essential. I switched from Domination to Team Deathmatch to improve my survival and get a better kill-to-death ratio. But I can probably earn more points taking one for the team and grabbing a flag instead of going for a kill. Domination is also a team game, and I mostly play on my own.

I also learned the maps better. When you know a map, you can start executing on a strategy to outwit your enemies. Some of the maps are very hard to figure out. For those ones, it pays to know that everyone dies in the middle. If you want to stay alive, keep to the edges.

If you know an area is well-trafficked, like a corner in a corridor, you can put a Bouncing Betty mine on it. If you’re going to snipe, find good cover. Match your weaponry to the map, as appropriate. Submachine guns are better for indoors, and sniping is good for maps with long, outdoor spaces. When you are moving, go from cover to cover. Sprint to get to your hiding spot, but don’t get caught walking in the open.

The weaponry of Black Ops II, which is set in the year 2025, is far more deadly than in past games. But that can be a good thing for new and average players. If you level up your assault rifle, such as my MTAR, enough, you qualify for more and more accessories. I quickly latched on to the Target Finder, a scope that identifies enemies in bright pink rectangles as soon as you look through the scope. That helps my older eyes discern enemies against any backdrop in a split-second. I simply move my crosshairs of my gun into that rectangle and a white “X” appears. I fire indiscriminately at that X until the enemy drops.

Now that I have leveled up my weapon (getting access to the better accessories in doing so), I don’t really want to go back and start over again with other weapons. But that could pay off for me if I do that with better guns. Overall, I’ve only completed 88 of more than 1,700 challenges, such as getting 25 kills with a particular weapon.

You could say that’s cheating to use such a powerful scope. But I contend that anybody can take advantage of this scope, and it really helps the people who need some extra help pinpointing exactly where the enemy is. It helps the “noobs” and the average players more than it does the excellent players. And Black Ops II has counters to it. You can spend a point in your 10-point armory kit to negate the effects of the Target Finder.

Gesner says the interesting thing is the “rock, paper, scissors” effect of the strategies and counter-strategies. If you know how to counter somebody’s else’s strategy, then you’re a step ahead. But good players adapt and find new counters to a winning strategy. In fact, you can actually watch a good player and copy his or her custom class kit in Call of Duty Elite. And there are many different ways to succeed at Call of Duty, which makes the game so fun to so many different types of players.

Good advice on staying alive that I didn’t know

The good thing is their advice had an immediate effect on my game play.

They fixed one obvious problem in my kit, or the things I took into battle. They told me to get rid of the grenade launcher attachment (known as the noob tube) since I clearly wasn’t using it that much. That saved me one of my 10 points and I could apply it to something else.

I was using grenades and concussion bombs, to no effect. Whenever I tossed these, they only hurt the enemies by pure accident. I replaced them with electric shock charges, which you can plant in the ground and stop an enemy cold with an electric blast. The blast doesn’t kill the enemy, but it holds them still for a precious second. If I am camping by a window, I can turn around as soon as I hear the electric blast and shoot the frozen enemy.

Supplementing the shock charges is the Bouncing Betty land mine, which pops up in the air and explodes when an enemy comes near. If you plant this near the shock charge, you can kill the stunned enemy. These two changes to my loadout enabled me to stay in a building, look out the window, and shoot passersby without worrying that someone would take me from behind. It made me much deadlier as a “camper.”

But it didn’t make me invincible. The maps are designed for balance. Gesner said that the best camping spots are also the ones with the most intersections. You can’t possibly watch your back if there are three entrances into a room where you are camping. Gesner says that every camping spot has its weaknesses (on purpose). Perhaps the best method for camping/sniping effectively is to keep moving — maneuver to one camping spot, take out an opponent, then seek cover and move to your next one.

The big counter to camping is a new accessory, the millimeter scanner. At short range, this scope can see through buildings and barriers, showing you the outline of someone who is stationary. If you have a weapon equipped with a “full metal jacket” bullet, you can shoot through walls and take the camper out. The millimeter scanner also works when you toss out a smoke grenade, as it allows you to see the silhouette of someone obscured in the smoke.

Some more tips

Study the maps. And look at your heat maps. If you get too bored as a camper, or if the enemy comes after you, try the next best thing. Move around on a circuit. You can run from camping spot to camping spot, or from one part of the map to another where you know you can get the drop on people who are moving in the usual heavily trafficked spots.

Get the right accessories. If the recoil of your assault rifle is a problem, get a foregrip or stock to reduce the recoil. If you’re a sniper, consider carrying an assault shield to create your own cover. Every accessory should complement your style of play.

Scorestreaks (such as an air or missile strike you can loose on an enemy when you reap enough kills in a row) are a lot of fun to unleash on the enemy. But they are costly if you use the “Hardline” perk to reduce the number of kills it takes to get a Scorestreak. If you never get enough kills to get a Scorestreak, the Hardline perk may be a waste.

Corners matter a lot. Never go around a corner in a sprint, said Ades. It takes time to stop, draw your weapon, aim, and shoot. If possible, you should be aiming down your gun site if you can when you round the corner. Glance at your minimap to see if you can spot an enemy. And toss out a shock charge or Bouncing Betty mine to check to see if there’s an enemy there that you can’t see.

Pay attention to the range of your gun. Light Machine Guns have longer range than an assault rifle, but they slow you down. Sniper rifles have long range, but they’re slow, have a low rate of fire, and they don’t work in close quarters. Submachine guns are good for short corridors and maps with lots of corners. But they have a short range. Each of the guns also has a different amount of recoil, but you can reduce that with accessories like the stock or foregrip. And you can further reduce it by lying prone on the ground and shooting.

Conclusion

As I noted, the battlefield of 2025 is deadly. But the changes made to Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s multiplayer serve to level the playing field. Once you learn how to play a certain way, you can try out another method, such as stealth. That should increase the time you spend with the game, and that is good for Activision and your overall competence as a multiplayer participant.

One of the best moves that Activision made was to make Call of Duty Elite free. It provides the necessary feedback and transparency that a player can use to objectively evaluate different fighting styles. It pays off if you take the time to analyze your game (or find a seasoned veterans to analyze it for you) and make the changes you need to stay alive longer.

Gesner said, “There are other camps that will disagree with our advice, and that’s what makes Call of Duty great.”

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Sony built the PlayStation Vita for bombastic, previously living-room-exclusive franchises like Call of Duty. With better graphics, a bigger screen, and a right analog stick, the Japanese electronics giant designed the PlayStation Portable successor to literally be a console … that just happens to fit in your hands.

Unfortunately, publisher Activision and developer Nihilistic Software (now known as nStigate) didn’t design the recently released, Vita-exclusive Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified to take advantage of the horsepower-packed handheld.

The on-the-go first-person shooter falls way short of achieving its ambitious mission in pretty much every way possible.

What you’ll like

Occasionally, it feels like you’re actually playing Call of Duty 

Declassified takes place in the shady, off-the-record Black Ops universe. That means you’ll play as familiar hard-assed protagonists Frank Woods and Alex Mason. And that also means you’ll be shooting up locations all over the world, from Russian military bases to the constricted alleyways of Saigon.

The series’ quick-twitch controls have, for the most part, made a successful transition to the Vita. You’ll depend on your shoulder buttons for looking down the crosshairs and pulling the trigger while the touchscreen takes care of things like throwing grenades and dishing out stab-happy melee attacks. Tapping the display can get frustrating in the middle of a firefight, unfortunately, which left me yearning for a console-style controller on an occasion or two.

I also found the analog-stick movement to be a little on the sensitive side, and I needed some time to get comfortable with the combat. But after an hour and a few menu-slider adjustments, I found my bearings.

Hostiles mode is a good way to kill bad guys … and free time

The wave-based Hostiles mode complements the remarkably thin single-player campaign and tasks you with surviving round after round of enemies. Your performance is based on the number of Russian Spetsnaz operatives, bomb-vest-wearing insurgents, and drug-cartel foot soldiers you can take down. If you make it past a round, the game rewards you with new weapons and ammo.

It’s all pretty straightforward, but I enjoyed this mode the most out of Declassified’s solo offerings because of its semi-addictive nature.

Multiplayer is fun … every now and then

Being a Call of Duty title, Declassified features a multiplayer component. You’ll find standard game types like team deathmatch and free-for-all along with the Call of Duty-centric Kill Confirmed and Drop Zone.

Kill Confirmed is a variant of team deathmatch where you have to pick up dog tags dropped by downed opponents while Drop Zone asks you to fight over specific locations on a map for points.

During certain matchups with skilled players, I enjoyed myself. The condensed nature of the maps led to plenty of corridor-style shooting galleries that helped add a few chevrons to my uniform. While limited, knowing that you’re playing these modes on a portable can at times be pretty cool.

What you won’t like

Frequently, it feels like you’re playing a Call of Duty clone

Many Vita owners will purchase Declassified for the big Call of Duty logo stamped on the box. Unfortunately, these people will not receive the travel-sized blockbuster they’re expecting.

Declassified has the COD name and includes most of Black Ops’ principal personalities, but that’s about it. The game features a single-player campaign that amounts to 10 “operations” and five shoot-the-target time trials. Now, take into account that each operation lasts about five minutes and that most time trials take fewer than 45 seconds to finish.

I don’t have to add the numbers for you to realize that the campaign is ridiculously short. I’m talking did-I-miss-something, I-can-blow-through-this-in-a-lunch-hour short.

Even worse, the operations have no checkpoints. That means if you go down in an ambush right before completing the final objective, you have to go through the whole sequence again from the beginning. While the scenarios are bite-sized, Nihilistic’s choice to artificially extend the single-player experience with the omission of a checkpoint system only highlights the campaign’s serious issues.

And don’t expect Declassified to fill in any narrative gaps or introduce intriguing side stories. Each operation begins with a brief cutscene featuring the classified documents, hand-written notes, and chaotic cuts we all expect from a Black Ops release, but the videos, just like the gameplay, are barebones. Throw in some horrible voice work from actors pretending to be the heroes from the console titles, and Declassified ends up feeling like a bad knockoff.

Multiplayer is uninspired … each time you boot it up

For every fun online shootout I had while playing Declassified, I endured multiple failed matchmaking attempts. Not only did I repeatedly get kicked out of encounters before they started, I often had to deal with unbalanced teams when I did get into skirmishes.

The multiplayer maps are small and generic, like their single-player counterparts. The tight hallways and confined enclosures lead to the aforementioned point-blank firefights. While fun, they take a lot of the strategy away. I constantly chose a close-quarters-combat loadout, knowing that I’d be mostly hitting people from short distances. Because of this, the other classes felt pointless.

What’s more disconcerting is that I encountered very few opponents online. Most of my matches included the same individuals, and I had trouble finding public games for modes like Drop Zone. This might be a broader PlayStation Vita-adoption issue, but for an online-heavy shooter like Declassified, having such a limited player base shortly after release is rather alarming.

Conclusion

Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified feels like a portable experience … in a pejorative mobile-app-store-crapware kind of way. Ironically, this shaky recruit of a game takes its place in the queue of modern-warfare shooters that have failed to match the last few flagship COD releases.

Declassified is brief, boring, and bland. It should have stayed locked up in the filing cabinet.

Score: 40/100

Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified released on Nov. 13, 2012 for the PlayStation Vita. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a copy of the game for the purpose of this review.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops has the power to bring young people together in a state of mad puppy love. Before you shake that off as B.S., consider the case of Beth Robinson, a 13-year-old girl in Cypress, Texas, near Houston.

She met her 12-year-old boyfriend through the first-person shooter game on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game console. She stole her mother’s ATM card and her brother’s car to meet the boy and got as far as Nashville, Tenn. On Thursday morning, Beth’s parents discovered she was gone. Beth was missing for more than 24 hours, and she was discovered hundreds of miles from home.

Word surfaced for authorities when Beth stopped in Hope, Ark., to gas up. She used her card, but it was declined six times. The attempts alerted authorities to where she was and put them on her tail. Finally, an alert state trooper, Dwayne Stanford, pulled her over. She explained that she was trying to find her boyfriend, Dylan. They met while chatting on Xbox Live and carried on a long-distance romance while they played Call of Duty: Black Ops on multiplayer. They communicated with each other through messages and voice-headset. When Beth’s father discovered the messages, he put an end to it. And that evidently prompted Beth’s runaway attempt. Her parents said they were worried sick during the episode.

The Robinsons decided to allow Beth to meet Dylan, and they went to Hodgenville, Ky. But they never found Dylan’s home. Beth won’t face charges.

[Image credit: KHOU]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For the last few years, Activision has delighted gamers with the elaborate and absurd bonuses that it includes in the various Call of Duty collectors’ editions. Modern Warfare 2 came with night-vision goggles, Black Ops came with a remote-controlled spy car, and now shooter fans will be wondering “where the hell am I going to put that thing?” again when they see what’s in the Black Ops II Care Package: a toy attack drone (dubbed the MQ-27 Dragonfire) with a gun on it.

Yes, really.

OK, it’s probably not a real gun, and it’s technically just a remote-controlled helicopter. But it is supposed to look like an attack drone, so you can probably use it to freak out your neighbors pretty easily. Joining the Dragonfire in the Care Package are the Nuketown 2025 and Nuketown Zombies in-game maps, both of which are based on a classic stage from the original Black Ops (and one of which contains zombies), as well as a SteelBook case, two collectible coins, exclusive weapon skins and player card backgrounds (so people in multiplayer will be envious of your fancy special edition), and a copy of the soundtrack.

PlayStation 3 owners will also get two dynamic themes, while the Xbox 360 version includes a pair of avatar items: a zombie costume and something called a CLAW that looks like a small robot hippo … but probably isn’t one. PC gamers will have to settle for the Digital Deluxe Edition, which drops the helicopter, SteelBook, and coins in favor of a free copy of Call of Duty: World at War.

If for some crazy reason you don’t need or want a toy attack drone, Activision also has the Hardened Edition. It contains all of the same bonuses as the Care Package, but without the Dragonfire, making it less crazy and less likely to warm a shelf in your local Best Buy in a few months.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops II collectors’ editions are available for preorder now. The Care Package is $180 (attack drones are expensive), with the Hardened and Digital Deluxe Editions set at $80.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Activision Blizzard has a lot at stake with the multiplayer mode of the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops II. If the game lives up to past titles in the modern combat series, it will have to sell millions of copies in its first week and generate more than billion dollars in retail revenue. Key to this game’s success is the multiplayer design, which will determine whether hardcore fans will stay with the game for months or even years. That’s why we’re excited to finally talk about how the multiplayer version of this game really works.
Black Ops II won’t hit until Nov. 13, but Activision is busy stoking demand for the game with a slow striptease for gamers. It is unveiling the hands-on multiplayer demo today at the Gamescom show in Cologne, Germany. I got my hands on the multiplayer gameplay and it felt both familiar and novel all at the same time. To me, it has lots of cool innovations that will make fans of the series happy. It has changes that veterans will scream bloody murder about, but all of us will have the same challenge of getting used to playing Call of Duty multiplayer in new ways.

Dan Bunting, the director of online at game developer Treyarch, believes that the team has to kill its own babies in order to move forward and innovate. The team wanted to revolutionize the combat in Black Ops II, so it was willing to change the multiplayer gameplay that wasn’t broken. Treyarch got rid of things that were considered sacrosanct in previous games.

While the Black Ops title from two years ago took place in the Cold War of the 1960s, this game is set in 2025 and features cutting-edge weaponry that will feel like science fiction.

One of the big changes is in the overhaul of the “Create a Class” feature. This is where you customize your kit so that you can choose your primary weapon, secondary weapon, special abilities known as “perks,” accessories such as stun grenades, and your camouflage. Now you no longer have to accept the categories the game gives you. You had to fill the three perk slots with something.

But not anymore. Instead, you get to pick 10 items and allocate them any way that you want. You can trade items from one category for extra items in another. This gives you many more choices for customization than you’ve ever had. You get a budget and decide what you want to take into battle, within the constraints of that budget. You’re essentially getting more creativity in designing your own class. If you want to equip your primary weapon with three attachments, you can do so, but you may not have any points to spend on a secondary weapon. I played with a class where I could dual-wield pistols, was tougher to kill, and could use a sniper rifle with three attachments (like a scope).

The game will also feature a new Score streaks system. These Score streaks reward players for helping their team win the game. They include actions such as capturing a flag, defending a teammate with an assault shield, and getting kills and assists. Each action has a different value and can influence the overall theater of operations. This system replaces the Killstreak system in the previous game, where skillful players were rewarded with powerful one-time advantages such as a drone strike. In this system, the rich got richer. The players that always got kills simply got even more kills with the Killstreak system. It was fun, but it wasn’t really fair to the weaker players.

With Score streaks, all players contribute to a greater good. If you do something to help the team, your Score streak meter rises. You could play an entire round and not get a single kill. But if you defend your teammates, you can get points and cash them in with a one-time bonus such as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that reveals the locations of the enemy on the map. It’s about doing things that help your team win. You can stack rewards up and still keep them balanced.

You can also win items such as aerial drones (dubbed the MQ-27 quad rotor drone) that you can pilot remotely so that you can kill from above. Or you can let the drones run on autopilot and do the killing for you while you control your soldier on the ground. You can set loose an AGR (autonomous ground robot) to walk around and shoot. Or (as pictured above), you can get inside it and control where it goes and what it shoots at.

You can also call in an A10 tank-killer aircraft and watch it do a bombing run. The pilot of the aircraft stays in radio contact with you and describes the results of the bomb run. And a Lightning Strike lets you target three areas and launch aerial strikes on them. In the past, you could call in a bombing run. But the results were only visible as numerical points flashed on the screen as the enemy gets killed.

Black Ops II’s multiplayer boosts some new weapons, such as the Microwave Turret. That’s a high-powered weapon used for crowd control. It emits an intense directed energy wave, and it is used to block routes that the enemy might take. You can also use a Swarm, which is a bunch of hunter-killer drones that can attack enemies in a big swarm. Another new weapon is the War Machine, an übergrenade launcher; and The Death Machine, a handheld Gatling gun. You can commandeer a Hellstorm Missile and guide it to its path, or you can deploy a bunch of cluster bombs and take out multiple enemies. You can also take control of a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft and rain gunfire from above.
One of the cool new features is that you can have up to six teams fighting each other in a single game. You can have up to 18 players per match, so you could have six teams of three players each, all fighting each other.

Activision showed maps including Aftermath, Turbine, and Cargo. The levels included all of the graphics upgrades, such as better lighting in which light appears to bounce off a floor or an object and illuminate something else that the bounced light rays hit.

Aftermath takes place in downtown Los Angeles after a drone strike. It’s a medium-sized map in which the best tactic is to stay with your teammates. I played this one as a “mercenary class” soldier with an assault gun. The obvious change that I saw almost immediately was the Target Finder, a reticle that will give you quick identification of a friend or foe when your gunsight moves over another person. This reticle really helped me fix my sights on enemies quickly and shoot them faster. For players that aren’t that good, this is a godsend. It will help equalize the game against those with the fastest reactions.

The Turbine map is set in Yemen and is an outdoor desert with a wind farm. Cargo is a smaller map set in the port of Singapore where cranes are picking up cargo from ships; you have to deal with constantly moving cargo containers.

The near-future setting means there are plenty of upgrades in technology. You can use Assault Shields that give you cover. A Millimeter Wave Scanner shows stationary targets and close range and through surfaces. (If you’re a camper or someone who hides behind cover and picks off those running by, this is bad for you). A Shock Charge (shown in the video below) is a nonlethal device that you throw into the ground, and it electrocutes and stuns enemies that come near it. On your weapon, you have a Laser Sight that gives you a fix on your target but is visible to other soldiers.

The multiplayer version of the game is also designed for eSports, or professional game tournaments. The League Play feature is built right into the game; it allows you to compete for prizes with people who are at a similar skill level. If you are the top player in the world, you will compete against others who are just as good in the rankings.

Another feature is Shoutcasting, where players can follow a tournament that is narrated by a “shoutcaster,” or commentator who knows the game well. The tools for Shoutcasting are built right into the dashboard of the game. The goal is to turn Call of Duty into a spectator sport. Since 30 million people play Call of Duty, Treyarch hopes the eSports version of Call of Duty will be bigger than Monday Night Football some day. The game will teach players how to be play-by-play shoutcasters.

The spectator features include a picture-in-picture view that shows a list of everyone in the game, their current Score streak, and their status. The Map View shows both sides of the battle from a top-down perspective. The Score Panel shows the big picture of one team’s stats versus another’s. As a spectator, you can listen in on the player conversations as the action happens, too.

The last major feature is Live Streaming, which will make it more fun to watch a competitive match as it happens. Right now, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up your own live streams. But the live streaming feature will be built directly into the game dashboard, eliminating that cost for gamers.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II debuts Nov. 13 on the PC, Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. I’m looking forward to all of the new ways to kill other players in Black Ops II. I think current fans are going to love it.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Call of Duty franchise doesn’t skimp on patriotism. Of course, “patriotism” in this sense entails gamers enacting their civil responsibility of blowing each other’s heads off in the first-person shooter multiplayer arenas of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Now, and just in time for the Fourth of July’s equally strong emphasis on blinding explosions and loud noises, publisher Activision kicks off a week-long half-off deal for all downloadable content released for both games on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. That certainly beats eating hot dogs smelling like lighter fluid all day.

Here’s a more specific list on the content packs going up for half the cheese:

• Modern Warfare 3 Content Collection #1
• Modern Warfare 3 Content Collection #2
• Black Ops First Strike
• Black Ops Escalation
• Black Ops Annihilation
• Black Ops Rezurrection

If getting your mitts on a bunch of new multiplayer maps (and zombies!) named after calamitous events at a discount isn’t enough, check this: A cut of your money funnels into the Call of Duty Endowment, an Activision-run charity for finding jobs for veterans.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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One of the smallest maps in Call of Duty history is also one of its most popular: Nuketown from Call of Duty: Black Ops. So the maps’ fans should be pleased by the announcement from Black Ops developer Treyarch that it’s updating the map, redubbing it “Nuketown 2025,” and making it a preorder bonus for its upcoming Black Ops II.

“[Nuketown 2025] is a limited-time offer, so if you don’t get a preorder copy, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have access to this map,” Activision’s official blogger, Dan Amrich, says in an update on his site.

The downloadable content will not be exclusive to any specific retailer. Everyone who preorders the next Call of Duty receives a redeemable code for Nuketown 2025 in the case with their copy of the game. Amrich also notes that the data for the map is not already on the disc, as has been the case with recent DLC from Capcom and other publishers.

Nuketown is one of the smallest multiplayer maps in the history of the Call of Duty series. It’s set in a U.S. nuclear-testing site that the designers arranged to look like a typical American suburb. The stage was so popular with fans that Treyarch built a “Nuketown 24/7″ playlist that featured only that map on repeat.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II is the fifth game in the series developed by Treyarch. Activision plans to release it across most major platforms on November 13.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Microsoft’s Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb posted his regular activity roundup for the Xbox 360’s online network, and the Minecraft mania flows strong on the lists.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition nabbed the top position for bestsellers as well as sliding in behind long-standing champions Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops for unique-user counts. Other titans felt the squeeze: Battlefield 3, Halo: Reach, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Gears of War 3 trailed by significant margins.

Here’s the punchline: All of this happened in Minecraft’s first week of release.

Creativity spawns popularity, or so the legions of Minecraft’s stalwart community believes. Originally released for the PC on November 18, 2011, the open-world tinkering title arms players with pick, axe, sword, and other tools while throwing open the floodgates of crowdsourced content, resulting in masterful works such as a recreated Westeros from Game of Thrones and Portal’s test chambers.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition launched on May 9, promptly fashioned a golden sword, and smashed digital-sales records on its first day in the wilds. Its 1,600 Microsoft Points ($20) cost, unusually large for an XBLA title, and its lack of a modding infrastructure didn’t prevent the acclaim rolling in.

Check out Major Nelson’s activity lists below. If you’re playing Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, what have you created so far? Let us know in the comments!

Xbox 360 Top Live Titles (based on unique users)

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
2. Call of Duty: Black Ops
3. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
4. FIFA 12
5. Battlefield 3
6. Halo: Reach
7. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
8. NBA 2K12
9. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
10. Gears of War 3
11. Grand Theft Auto IV
12. Trials Evolution
13. Forza Motorsport 4
14. Mass Effect 3
15. NHL 12
16. Madden NFL 12
17. Halo 3
18. Red Dead Redemption
19. Saints Row: The Third
20. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Top Arcade Titles (Full Versions purchased)

1. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
2. Trials Evolution
3. The Walking Dead
4. Fable Heroes
5. Fez
6. Pinball FX2
7. Awesomenauts
8. I Am Alive
9. Castle Crashers
10. Family Game Night
11. Fruit Ninja Kinect
12. Bloodforge
13. Toy Soldiers: Cold War
14. Gotham City Impostors
15. Toy Soldiers
16. Trials HD
17. Dungeon Defenders
18. Full House Poker
19. Peggle
20. Magic: The Gathering — Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012

Top Indie Games (Full Versions purchased)

1. CastleMiner Z
2. CastleMiner
3. Total Miner: Forge
4. The $1 Zombie Game
5. FortressCraft: Chapter 1
6. The Impossible Game
7. Avatar Paintball
8. Avatar Deathmatch
9. Fortress Wars
10. FLIRT
11. End of Days: Infected vs. Mercs
12. Avatar Legends
13. Flight Adventure 2
14. Toy Stunt Bike 2
15. Solar 2
16. Firing Range 2
17. Miner4Ever
18. Avatar Air Wars
19. Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy!
20. Attack of the Zombie Horde

Games for Windows Top Live Titles (based on unique users)

1. Grand Theft Auto IV
2. Age of Empires Online
3. Batman: Arkham City
4. Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition
5. Microsoft Flight
6. Batman: Arkham Asylum
7. DiRT 3
8. Gotham City Impostors
9. F1 2011
10. Resident Evil 5
11. Fallout 3
12. Street Fighter X Tekken
13. Toy Soldiers
14. Fable III
15. BioShock 2
16. Colin McRae: Dirt 2
17. Bulletstorm
18. F1 2010
19. Street Fighter IV
20. Section 8: Prejudice

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s saying a lot since Modern Warfare 3 was the fastest-selling game in history when it went on sale last November, eclipsing sales of the previous record setter, Call of Duty: Black Ops, from 2010. Modern Warfare 3 currently holds the record for the most pre-ordered game of all time and was among the top 20 pre-orders ever on Amazon.com. Modern Warfare sold more than $1 billion worth of games since it debuted.

Black Ops II will be released Nov. 13. Pre-orders are now being sold on Activision.com, Steam, Amazon, Best Buy, Gamestop, and Target for $59.99.

[Editor's note: minor spoilers on game locations]

The one requirement for a Call of Duty game is that it has to run at 60 frames per second on a console. The graphics of the game have to look good, but they can’t slow the game down.

So you would think it would be very hard to make Call of Duty: Blacks Ops II, which is being unveiled today, look any better than Call of Duty: Black Ops from 2010. After all, they’re both running on the Xbox 360, which was introduced in 2005, and the PlayStation 3, which was introduced in 2006.

Happily, the Treyarch team has been able to squeeze  more 3D graphics performance out of the consoles.

“You have to challenge assumptions,” said Dan Bunting, director of online at Treyarch. “We didn’t want to rely on the stuff we have done in the past. We locked ourselves in a room and decided what do we want to take away from the game in terms of technology.”

Treyarch brought together a “strike team which we called the Beautiful Corner team.” That was an affectionate term for a vertical slice program that defines a flow of a map, starting with one corner of the map. They studied the graphics technology and defined what the game would look like. They plotted for four months, and in the end, they wanted to produce “PC quality graphics running at 60 frames per second on a console.”

The performance of consoles is frozen in time because every console has to be the same, and it presents developers with a stable development platform. The PC, on the other hand, evolves every year and can absorb the latest and greatest graphics chips and microprocessors. But a talented programming team can rewrite code so that it runs more efficiently on a console and frees up resources to do more things.

“It’s a simple statement and a big ask,” Bunting said. “Getting PC quality graphics running on a console is tough. A seasoned team can do it, but the graphics are expensive in terms of rendering power. The tricky part is the 60 frames per second.”

Gamers won’t tolerate anything except fast and fluid gameplay and graphics. Immediate responsiveness is what you need when you are in a duel with another player.

After those four months had passed, the team had completed two maps. They have since made other maps now and are now pushing the technology even harder.

Some of the major changes they made were with lighting effects. ”Lighting is the rub that pulls the room together,” Bunting said. “It makes it feel immersive and realistic. Lighting is where we focused our energy.”

One of the upgrades is better high-dynamic range (HDR), which allows for both light and dark elements in the same scene. HDR pulls out more details that you would otherwise miss in a scene with different kinds of lighting and shadows.

Another new element is “bounce lighting,” where light bounces off the ground and illuminates another surface. You can see this kind of lighting if you are looking out at the end of a tunnel. Light from the outside hits the floor, bounces off the ceiling, and creates secondary light sources. In a room with windows, you will see softer shadows.

Techniques are what artists use to accomplish cool visuals, once they have the technology. Bunting showed a map set on an island near Yemen. It has unique trees that have complex branches and leaves. With “vertex baked lighting,” the trees get a very dense interaction of light and shadow.

Ambient occlusion, which is what happens when light bounces around a room a lot, causes some rooms to have really dark shadows in the corners. Light reflects off of weapons in different ways. Particle effects, like motes of dust, bits of ash, or insects flying around add granular details. Sand on the ground will obscure the asphalt on a road. But if you see cracks in the pavement, the sand will fall into those crevices and really look like what you would expect. Rocks on the side of the road have more depth.

“We can do a lot more of these effects in the same scene,” Bunting said.

In the map (dubbed Aftermath) of a destroyed Los Angeles, you see things such as water puddles on the street. Some of those puddles have colorful oil slicks on them. You’ll see many more things happening on a screen at the same time compared to past games, said Mark Lamia, studio head at Treyarch. Even objects in the far background will have visible features, such as a skyscraper on fire in the distance.

In the map, you see a lot of rubble, steel girders, and destruction. The landscape has a lot more detail to render. The artists started working on this level by taking photographs of downtown Los Angeles. The scene is layered with smoke, fires, shadows, sparks from live electrical wires, and sunlight coming through the glass.

“We’re not resting on our laurels,” Bunting said. “We want to create these new experiences for the Call of Duty franchise. We don’t want to take anything for granted.”

[Photo credit: Dean Takahashi]

Check out our other coverage of Call of Duty: Black Ops II:

• First trailer released
• Treyarch unveils Black Ops II, a.k.a. Attack of the Drones
• Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia on taking design risks (interview)
• How Treyarch created realistic human faces
• Creating the sounds of future wars

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The official Call of Duty website is counting down to a “world reveal” (most likely Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, if all the recent leaks on the Internet are anything to go by) on May 1 during the NBA playoffs on TNT.

The site is also filled with “classified” pictures, some of which will unlock throughout the rest of April.

Activision has released a new Call of Duty every November since Call of Duty 2 in 2006, which was a launch title for the Xbox 360. Since then, developers Infinity Ward and Treyarch have taken turns handling the series, with the former responsible for the Modern Warfare titles and the latter 2010′s Black Ops. Since Modern Warfare 3 came out last, it’s likely that the next, Treyarch-developed entry in the series will be a sequel to the wildly popular Black Ops.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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You see, even though I’ve invested days of my life in Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer, my rank is a lowly 5,573,021 — although that’s still pretty good considering that maybe 25 million or more have bought the game since its debut on Nov. 8. I figure I’ve got a better record than four out of five players. But the stats also mean that millions of players have invested more time than I did to make it to level 80 — the rank of Commander. Now I can start the whole cycle of leveling up again in Prestige mode.

The numbers above show that engagement of Call of Duty players are through the roof, and that tells you why it’s so hard to knock Call of Duty titles out of the position of best-selling video game of all time. Call of Duty Black Ops from last year and this year’s Modern Warfare 3 have generated more than $2 billion in sales in the last two years. Sales are one thing, but the time spent playing the product is another.

One of the attractions of Call of Duty multiplayer is that it’s a very instrumented experience. When I say I lost my way to the top, I know that because the game’s metrics tell me just how terrible I am, one bullet at a time. I can measure the impact of using different weapons or grenades. I can pinpoint the play pattern that best suits my skills.

The metrics tell me I was on the winning team 137 times and lost 195 times. My accuracy rate for shooting was 8.29 percent (yes, they count every bullet). I had 2,356 kills, 677 assists, and 5,580 deaths. My kill-death ratio, therefore, was 0.422. In terms of number of kills, I ranked 6,164,044 of all players. 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. Since I can get points for grabbing flags, that improves my overall ranking on multiplayer.

These stats are telling in a few ways. 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. That means multiplayer has significantly extended the amount of time that players are putting into this game. And that means Activision Blizzard is capturing a significant slice of the available game time for millions upon millions of hardcore gamers.

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. 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. Nobody has time to play mediocre games anymore, because the big hits suck in all of our 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. 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.

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. 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.

At the same time, things are different from a year ago. 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. That’s why Tencent bought a majority stake in Riot Games for nearly $400 million. This game and others like it are played year-round.

In recognition of that trend, Activision Blizzard has changed its own game to adapt. It has launched Call of Duty Elite, a hardcore social network for Call of Duty fans. With it, I can get a lot more engaged than I already am. So far, I’ve spent most of my time playing the game and little on the Elite network. But it has some intriguing options for improvement, so I won’t always have to play with a big “L” on my forehead. I can view videos of each map and the best way to fight on it, either as a sniper or a short-range fighter. It has heat maps that show all the deaths on the map in red, based on where players were shot. That tells me where the hot spots on the map are and how to position myself for maximum survival and ambush opportunities.

Elite has a free version and a paid version for $49.99 a year that gives you access to all of the monthly “content drops,” or new maps and other downloadable content (DLC) that is arriving much more frequently than the map packs of the past. In short, Elite is a way for enthusiastic players to sink a lot more time into the game and the Call of Duty culture than they have in the past. And if it can help me feel like I’m a winner, not a loser, then I’ll probably stick around and play the game even more.

Call of Duty, now in its eighth iteration, has held my attention because it’s a lot like a Las Vegas slot machine, where the key is to keep you playing. It’s a fast-action combat game in which split-second timing matters. Typical multiplayer matches last about 10 minutes, which is great for when you only have a short amount of time available. The mature-rated game is very violent and bloody, but it isn’t exactly realistic in the way it plays and looks. Players can move much faster than they can in real life. The combat is fierce, but not excessively bloody. I can take off and play another game, and then come back to Call of Duty during a lull in the new release schedule, like right now.

At the end of the multiplayer round, you can see how many Call of Duty points and experience points you’ve earned. The experience points allow you to level up. In the early levels, it takes only a few thousand points to move up. But later in the game, it could take 47,000 or more to reach the next level. The top experience level is 80, but once you hit that, you can start over and get up to level 90 again, earning what is called Prestige levels.

But getting back to me as a loser: My kill-to-death ratio with last year’s Black Ops was 0.69. That was partly due to the fact that it was a lot easier for unskilled players to kill veteran players with the remote-controlled RC-XD car bomb. That reward equalized a lot of the combat, but there is no such salve in Modern Warfare 3. My accuracy was better a year ago, at 16 percent. That’s due in part because I’ve been using a less-accurate weapon this year, a submachine gun, to try to get the drop on rivals faster. This year, I’ve enjoyed playing Domination on the short-range maps such as Piazza, Dome, and Hardhat.

Even so, I’ve been able to make more contributions to my team effort in Modern Warfare 3. That’s because Activision’s developers — Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Studios, Raven Software, and others — changed the way weaker players participate in the combat effort. In the past, players could earn “killstreaks,” a reward that let you earn a significant weapon for a short time, such as an RC-XD car or an attack helicopter. To earn those rewards, you had to rack up a lot of kills in a row.

Raptr, the social network for gamers, has collected some interesting data on the usage of Black Ops versus Modern Warfare 3. In the opening months, Black Ops had 19 percent more play time per player at 49 hours versus 41 hours for Modern Warfare 3, according to Raptr. But as of this date, Modern Warfare 3 is performing better than Black Ops. Fewer people are player Black Ops, naturally, as that is an older game.

The average Black Ops player has played 58 percent more than Modern Warfare 3, at 130 hours versus 82 hours, for the entire history. That’s expected, since Black Ops has had an extra year to rack up more hours. In the opening month, average sessions lasted 2.11 hours for Modern Warfare 3 and 2.18 hours for Black Ops. Today, the average session length for Modern Warfare 3 is 1.72 hours, compared to 1.59 hours for Black Ops.

“Overall, every Call of Duty game appears to do a remarkable job of keeping gamers engaged for well over a year, something you don’t seem is many other annually updated gaming series,” said John Lee, vice president of marketing for Raptr. “Even when Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3 are two different storylines, gamers are still playing each Call of Duty game with the same sort of persistent dedication year in and out. The Call of Duty formula of annual updates, alternating between two different stories/dev teams, robust multiplayer support, and a steady infusion of DLC doesn’t appear to result in brand fatigue just yet. Both games are holding rock steady when it comes to playtime behavior. “

This year, the developers made the game play more accessible. You earn “pointstreaks” to get the new weapon rewards even if you’re playing in a support role. If you use the “support” strike package rather than “assault,” you can keep racking up points toward weapon rewards even if you die a lot in between kills. I was able to get the Stealth Bomber award 15 times in my support role, which means I was able to help my teammates and rain bombs on the map, even if I didn’t get a lot of kills in a row. This is a significant design change that makes the game more appealing to less-skilled players. And it’s the kind of thing that Activision Blizzard has to do to keep interest high in the world’s biggest video game. If you’re competing with this game, take note on how to do it right.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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By the end of the year, we may finally solve one of the biggest mysteries in the gaming world: Why do red and blue Spartans hate each other so, so very much?

At Microsoft’s recent Spring Showcase 2012, we learned that 343 Industries has some grand plans for Halo 4, the sci-fi first-person shooter due out this holiday season for the Xbox 360. What are these plans? Heck if we know. The studio, who’s taking over franchise-development duties from Bungie, only teased us press guys with a few tiny morsels, never revealing much. But if you keep your eyes open, if you listen carefully, and if you talk to the right people, you might be able to glean a few juicy bits…like we did below.

Read on to see what we’ve discovered about Master Chief’s next adventure, and watch 343′s brand-new video documentary at the end of the second page to see if you can mine some more info from the elusive developers. Also check out our other news and previews from the Xbox 360 Spring Showcase.

1. The progression system won’t just be cosmetic

By earning enough experience in the Halo: Reach, you can unlock new shoulder pads, visors, visual effects, and other accessories for your online avatar. Too bad they really didn’t mean squat. “Armor upgrades — they were definitely aesthetic [in Halo: Reach],” says franchise development director Frank O’Connor. “And it works for a lot of people. I get an awful lot of [private messages] because I have some weird, fancy armor that people are obsessed with. So it matters to some people. But the reality is that they don’t have any impact on your game, other than it sometimes makes you a bigger target.”

That’s going to change with Halo 4, though details are non-existent at this time. “One of the things we wanted to do with Halo 4,” says creative director Josh Holmes, “was introduce a progression system that allows players to unlock things that not only change the way their character looks but also the way their character plays…that empowers players to make choices that have a meaningful impact on their gameplay experience in multiplayer. That’s a big change, but it’s one of the things we’re most excited about.”

2. On-screen icons will point out where weapon pickups are…for a special reason

New in Halo 4 are visual icons that point out which weapons are nearby (similar to Crysis 2 or Gears of War 3, only without the need to hold down a button to scan). This will be useful for newer players who haven’t yet memorized where every gun spawns, but it might also serve a deeper purpose, too. “We mark the shotgun for a reason,” says O’Connor. “There will be a very specific reason why the icon’s there that you’ll learn about later.”

3. Large feel-good text will tell you how you killed someone

In the brief demo that we saw, the words “Headshot kill!” or “Melee kill!” will flash on the screen when you’ve killed someone in the corresponding way.

4. Halo 4 will be higher resolution (but still not 60 frames per second)

Word is Halo 4 will run at a resolution of 1280×720, up a tad from Reach’s 1152×720. But if you’re hoping for Call of Duty’s silky smooth 60-frames-per-second speed, you’re out of luck. Halo 4 will remain at the series-standard 30 frames per second.

5. You’ll be able to customize loadouts

“You have the ability to choose from a wide arsenal of weapons and abilities that can be a part of your character’s individual loadout,” says Holmes. Right now, no one outside of 343 knows how much more ambitious this will be compared to what Reach offered.

6. Power weapons may not be on set timers

We’re hearing that power weapons may not respawn in at set intervals, adding some unpredictability as to when rocket launchers, Spartan Lasers, and WMDs may reappear on the battlefield. The point of this is to make sure experienced players won’t dominate matches by running timed circuits to grab all the best goodies.

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Along with the ESRB, online game retailers are notorious for revealing unannounced games long before their publishers would like them to be. Amazon France seems to have done just that, according to GameBlog.fr. GameBlog took a screencap of the above product listing before stating that title was changed to “Call of Duty 9″ and then delisted altogether.

Soon after GameBlog updated its story claiming that Activision France demanded the news be taken down from the site, and when GameBlog did not comply it was subsequently blacklisted, the full details of which can be read here. GameBlog also reveals (through archived screencaps) that a number of other game sites did pull down news reports regarding Black Ops 2, allegedly at the behest of Activision PR.

Activision has already admitted that Treyarch was working on this year’s iteration of Call of Duty. Treyarch has also never been one to innovate on its own, so it makes sense that they would follow in Infinity Ward’s footsteps and try to make Black Ops a franchise-within-a-franchise a la Modern Warfare.

BlackOps2Game.com recently reported that Activision stealth-acquired BlackOps2.com, further pointing to confirmation that the title is indeed in the works.

Last but not least is the mention of Call of Duty Black Ops 2 on a a Nerve Software artist’s public LinkedIn page. It has since been taken down, but the internet never forgets:

Nerve Software has previously worked with Treyarch on Quantam of Solace and the original Call of Duty: Black Ops. Oops!

We’ve reached out to Activision for comment and will update the story if they choose to reply.

Update (2/19): Step3, an external PR firm that frequently works for Activision in the U.S., commented to GamesBeat on behalf of the company: ”Activision doesn’t blacklist journalists. We believe this was a misunderstanding and are working towards a resolution”. No comment was made regarding Black Ops 2.

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That includes both free and paid memberships, and it represents a sizable chunk of the overall numbers of consumers who bought the game. About 1.5 million of those users have chosen to pay $4.99 a month for the privilege of getting the latest content for titles such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which was the biggest-selling game of 2011. A subscription to Elite costs less per year than getting all of the downloadable content coming over the next nine months at full price.

Digital revenues, such as downloadable content or the social network subscriptions, added up to $1.6 billion for all of 2011. That was more than 34 percent of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company’s revenues for all of 2011.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 players have logged more than 639 million hours of game time through Dec. 31. The total number of unique online gamers playing the game was 12 percent greater than the number for last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops. (I’m one of those Modern Warfare 3 players, with a ranking of 71, or Major General II, on multiplayer).

Eric Hirshberg, chief executive of Activision Publishing, said in an analyst conference call, “We have grown the Call of Duty franchise every year for the past eight years.” Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops, and Modern Warfare 2 are the top three most-played games on Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service for the Xbox 360.

Hirshberg said that a new Call of Duty game will debut in 2012, repeating a pattern that has taken place every year in recent history. There are 40 million monthly active Call of Duty users, with more than 20 million for Modern Warfare 3 alone. Call of Duty China will also launch sometime soon.

Meanwhile, the company ‘s new Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure hybrid toy-game was a big success, with more than 20 million toys sold. Skylanders has more than 1 million registered users for the online version. A new version called Skylanders Giants is coming this year.

The data reveals that Zynga’s user base of more than 265 million monthly active users are playing games almost as much as the top hardcore gaming franchises. The pie chart at left shows that Activision’s Call of Duty is the top franchise in share of time spent at 43 percent, followed by World of Warcraft at 17 percent and Microsoft’s Halo at 14 percent. But Zynga’s Ville games (FarmVille, PetVille, YoVille, FrontierVille and CityVille) games have 13 percent of time spent on games, followed by core gaming franchises at 12 percent. That means players are spending more time with Zynga’s Ville titles than they are with Assassin’s Creed, Gears of War, Mass Effect, and Grand Theft Auto.

In social games, Zynga has more than 60 percent of the overall market. While hardcore franchises such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft are played for longer durations, Zynga’s Ville games are played four times more frequently. Zynga also takes advantage of those frequent sessions by constantly serving up marketing messages to stir up engagement, cross-promote  its other games, and handle transactions.

Since the launch of YoVille in 2008, Zynga’s Ville games have almost doubled in average session time length. Average session length is usually around 5 minutes.

In getting users to move from one Ville game to another, Zynga is doing great. Even though Zynga’s user size per game is at least five times bigger than hardcore games, it is still able to grab an equal proportion of users from game to game (see graph at right).

In total online players since 2008, Zynga’s top titles racked up three times more hours than the rest of the top 10 combined. (This was measured before the resurgence of Electronic Arts with its Sims Social title). Zynga’s share of play time was 75 percent for the top 10 social games since 2008, compared to 10 percent for EA PopCap, 5 percent for Digital Chocolate’s Millionaire City, 5 percent for Kabam’s Kingdoms of Camelot, 3 percent for Wooga’s Monster World, and 2 percent for Kixeye’s Backyard Monsters.

Raptr also found that Zynga’s user base is loyal. For its last four major games — FrontierVille, Treasure Isle, CityVille, and Empires & Allies), Zynga pulled 9o percent of the players from existing users.

As for crossover between hardcore gamers and Zynga fans, about 12 to 20 percent of Zynga’s CityVille players have also played hardcore games such as StarCraft 2, Lord of the Rings Online, and Call of Duty Black Ops. The percentage of Xbox 360 players who have played a Zynga game increased to 30 percent in 2011, up 50 percent from a year before.

As Zynga said in its SEC filing, the top 2 percent of loyal players are crucial to its success, as those players are “whales,” or the company’s biggest spenders. They play three times more than the average player. The top 2 percent play Zynga games for 120 minutes per day, compared to 40 minutes for an average player. That means that 5 million paying players are supporting Zynga’s gaming business.

The report was based on data collected from Raptr’s player base and it looked at data from Raptr’s launch until August 2011.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The event is a stroke of marketing brilliance for Activision Blizzard, which wants to stoke the video game fans into a frenzy of excitement around upcoming titles such as Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, which debuts Nov. 8. If it works, then fans will be more loyal and won’t have time for rival games such as Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3. This live event is a way for Activision Blizzard to preserve its leadership in the multibillion-dollar first-person shooter combat game market. It is consistent with the game’s focus on immersing fans deep into the culture of the game, similar to the way Activision’s sister company, Blizzard, does for its fans at the annual Blizzcon event.

The event will take place on a still-secret 12-acre venue in Los Angeles on Sept. 2-3. More than 6,000 fans will be able to attend the event, which will include news revelations about Modern Warfare 3′s multiplayer game. Attendees will be the first to get hands-on time with the multiplayer game and the title’s new Spec Ops survival co-op mode. (I played this mode with VentureBeat’s Matthew Lynley at E3 and it’s a lot of fun).

Eric Hirshberg, chief executive of Activision Publishing, a division of Activision Blizzard, said in an interview that the event will fuse real-world Call of Duty action experiences — like a paintball battle in a scene that replicates the “Scrapyard” multiplayer map in the Call of Duty Black Ops game from last year. Activision will also have a $1 million Call of Duty tournament sponsored by Activision and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console business.

“We’re pulling out all of the stops,” Hirshberg said. “You could say it is like Blizzcon, but this is going to be an event like no other.”

Players will have a chance to “speed-run” through the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 map, “The Pit,” in real life. Developers will be on hand for question-and-answer sessions. There will be an on-site Call of Duty armory and museum, and live entertainment.

Attendees will also be the first to see the full functionality of Call of Duty Elite, the new online social network for Call of Duty fans. Players can qualify for the tournament by playing Call of Duty Black Ops multiplayer in regional promotions. The players will then get a chance to compete to be the best Call of Duty player in the world. Fans can also watch the experience through TV and the web.

Tickets will cost $150 and all proceeds of the event will go toward benefiting war veterans through the Call of Duty Endowment, a nonprofit that helps veterans transition to civilian life. Tickets go on sale July 19. Call of Duty Black Ops, which debuted last November, still draws about 30 million fans a month and is the best-selling video game of all time.

Here’s an interview Rob Smith, editor in chief of Machinima.com, did with Hirshberg.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops Annihilation map pack is now available on Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service for the Xbox 360. The launch of the map pack is a pretty big event, considering the original game generated more than $1 billion in sales and has become the best-selling video game of all time since its launch in November. Activision Blizzard says that its Call of Duty map packs — sold for 1200 Microsoft points, or $15 each — are the best-selling add-on content on Xbox Live. They’re basically a license to print money and can keep a game alive for much longer than the typical sales cycle.

The map pack has four new multiplayer maps and a new Zombie-shooting level where players can shoot each other or blast apart zombies all day long. The company previously released its First Strike map pack in February and its Escalation map pack in May. That’s a faster pace than the release of map packs for the previous year’s game, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.

Annihilation should keep players busy as they await the next major game installment in the combat game series. On Nov. 8, Activision Blizzard will release Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. That release will include the launch of Call of Duty Elite, a social network for the game series with options for premium subscriptions.

The map pack includes:

–  “Hangar 18,” located in the highly classified military base of Area 51, where gamers will fight through experimental weapons labs, the SR-71 test hangar and a mysterious autopsy room.
–  “Drive-In,” where players experience close-quarters combat through a 1960′s American drive-in theater, complete with a snack shack and a classic arcade.
–  “Silo,” where gamers can infiltrate a massive secret Soviet nuclear missile site under construction within a multi-level battleground.
–  “Hazard,” located on the cliff sides of Cuba, where gamers can explore a coastal golf course fit for a Dictator, and where stocked clubhouses and
manicured fairways meet snipers hidden in sand traps.
–  “Shangri-La,” the all-new Zombies experience, transports players into a mythical paradise overrun with the undead. Players will come face-to-face with new species of zombies and navigate through a labyrinth of underground caverns, all set within a legendary shrine lost in an exotic jungle.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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But what Activision Blizzard did not announce was when — or if — the map pack would come to players on Sony’s online gaming network, the PlayStation Network (PSN). That could be because the PSN experienced an outage after hackers were able to break into the network and steal sensitive information about more than 77 million PSN users. Sony was forced to take the PSN offline while Xbox Live remained online and flourished during Sony’s downtime.

Call of Duty Black Ops is one of the best-selling video games of all time, with sales of more than $1 billion since the launch in November. Activision Blizzard previously launched its First Strike map pack in February. Itlaunched its most recent map pack, Escalation, in May.

The map packs, which are add-ons for the game that feature new levels for multiplayer matches, are a lucrative business for Activision Blizzard. Both previous map packs are the highest-selling add-ons on Xbox Live, according to Microsoft.

The third map pack, called Annihilation, will give Call of Duty: Black Ops players four new maps: Hangar 18 (one of the most famous buildings in Area 51) Drive-In, Silo and Hazard. The new maps will take gamers to exotic locations like Shangri-La, where they will have to fend off hordes of zombies and avoid traps in the legendary location that’s supposed to be an earthly paradise.

Activision Blizzard has said customers have played the Black Ops game online for more than 2 billion hours since its launch in November. You can expect more Call of Duty fans to log into the Xbox Live service starting today, since they won’t be able to play on the PSN or on Sony Online Entertainment’s PC online games, which were shut down today pending an intrusion investigation.

Activision Blizzard said some time ago that it had sold more than 20 million Call of Duty map packs, generating more than $300 million in sales. So it’s clear that map packs are a big business, and video game publishers may want to avoid publishing rival games on May 3, since gamers will be a little busy. You can catch a full video of the trailer for the map pack below. Activision Blizzard’s first map pack, First Strike, sold more than 1.4 million copies on Xbox Live on its first day of sales.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The only question is whether Modern Warfare 3 will eclipse last year’s Call of Duty Black Ops as the best-selling game of all time. Black Ops has cleared well over $1 billion worth of sales since its debut last November, and there are still 7 million people playing the multiplayer version of the game each day. Based on this demo, it seems like the Call of Duty machine is running at full throttle. Any takers on whether this game tops Black Ops, which sold more than $650 million worth in five days?

Infinity Ward, the studio behind Call of Duty, isn’t taking success for granted this time around. After a legal dispute between two of the co-founders of Infinity Ward and Activision Blizzard’s top management ripped the studio apart, Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella left Activision Blizzard, taking dozens of developers with them, and created a new studio, Respawn Entertainment. Infinity Ward healed itself, hired new developers, and teamed up with Sledgehammer games to stay on the punishing schedule of releasing a major Call of Duty game every year. Gamers don’t seem to care about who makes the games. They just want more of them so they can play Call of Duty forever.

Although the original developers deserve a great deal of praise for starting Modern Warfare, it seems like there’s a formula for the development of each new game. It goes like this. Take the last game as the starting point and improve the graphics while keeping the hair-trigger speed of the game the same. Then take the gamer into brand new environments that are more impressive than the past ones. Drop the player into excruciatingly intense combat scenes and leave them to their own devices. Then craft a story with a dark conspiracy, develop seamless cinematics that merge with intense game play scenes, and immerse the players in nonstop violence so that they feel like they’re stepping into a world that is every bit as dangerous as the real one.

While I say there’s a formula for coming up with one hit game after another, it is one that pretty much only the Call of Duty team knows how to execute. Try as they might, rivals haven’t knocked Call of Duty of its perch yet. Electronic Arts’ DICE studio will provide some serious competition for the first time in years as it launches Battlefield 3 later this year. But that game franchise’s audience hasn’t yet risen to the level of fanaticism as Call of Duty’s, at least in terms of sheer numbers of dedicated gamers. EA is going to invest heavily in the marketing of the game and it may very well come up with some surprises. Perhaps the team at Respawn Entertainment, which has signed up with EA, will be the one to knock Modern Warfare off its throne. But that won’t happen this year, as Respawn has a long way to go before it debuts a game. With Modern Warfare 3, Activision Blizzard is trying to press its advantage as one of the few companies that can churn out an outstanding game every single year.

The demo that we saw started with scenes from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, which debuted in 2009. In that story, the forces of terrorist leader Vladimir Makharov left Washington D.C. in ruins. Now the combat chaos has spread to Manhattan, where an intense firefight plays out in the ruins of the New York Stock Exchange. Other scenes take place in the war-torn districts of Paris and London. The battles also take place in parts of Africa, Russia and the Himalayas.

“We are taking the scale to the new level,” said Robert Bowling, creative strategist at Infinity Ward, speaking to a crowd full of game critics. “Moving from the outskirts to the heart of major cities.”

The demo started with a Delta Force team in Manhattan. You fight your way through streets, rubble, and inside buildings to get to the stock exchange, where there’s plenty of glass to shatter on the trading floor. The soldiers toss a powerful new weapon, the “nine bang” grenade, which explodes multiple times and takes out multiple enemies at a time. Tanks accompany you and crush concrete barriers. If you glance at a TV, you’ll see CNN running a special report on the attack on New York.

You take on Russian soldiers in the firefights. But there’s always some kind of twist. At one point, for instance, helicopter gunships close in on your position. You have to use a Reaper drone to fire a missile up in the air and, using a camera view inside the missile, bring the projectile crashing down on top of the gunship. The explosion is quite satisfying. Then you jump onto the chopper and fire its gatling gun as a crazy helicopter chase ensues — not unlike an over-the-top car chase in a Hollywood action movie. Your chopper takes a hit and starts spinning out of control before it miraculously recovers.

Is this realistic combat? Of course not. But it’s entertaining and classic Call of Duty. In the London level, the combat starts out quietly, as British SAS soldiers begin a quiet assault in darkness. The quiet kills become noisier and noisier until you are fully engaged in a firefight in the rain. Dramatic music plays as your team chases down the escaping bad guys in a subway train. The two trains go barreling down the tracks as terrified London tube civilians run for cover. The train derails right in front of you.

If it’s possible to consider firefights entertaining, then this collection of firefights will leave you laughing and surprised as a gamer, even if you are pretty jaded by years of virtual combat. And you can bet that the launch of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 will turn out to be one of the major entertainment events of the year.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The first-person shooter game is being made by Activision Blizzard’s Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games studios. Last year’s Call of Duty Black Ops game sold more than $650 million worth in the first five days of sales last fall. The trailer shows disturbing scenes of some of the world’s biggest cities — Manhattan, Paris, and Berlin — in ruins as soldiers fight through the streets in intense gun battles.

The trailer, which leaked out, shows that the company’s game developers are planning on delivering over-the-top combat experiences as they have done every year. Modern Warfare 3 is the third installment in Call of Duty’s modern combat tour, with scenes set in urban jungles such as Manhattan. It is the first version of Modern Warfare created after the founders — Jason West and Vince Zampella — were fired in a legal dispute with Activision’s chief executive Bobby Kotick. Kotick’s mission is to show that the company can weather the departure of the founders and many talented developers without a hiccup in the annual release schedule.

The scenes show a wide variety of combat scenes, including firefights in front of the New York Stock Exchange, tank battles, launches of nuclear missiles, underwater divers, helicopter gunship duels, battles on subway trains, and other urban places that are transformed into fighting nightmares. Various pieces of the game’s content have leaked out in recent days, but Activision Blizzard started officially teasing the game on May 16. The new trailer is the first look at the game play.

The trailer says simply, “It doesn’t take the most powerful nations on earth to create the next global conflict — just the will of a single man.”

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The company has been riding high on sales of Call of Duty Black Ops, the 1960s combat shooting game that has dominated video game sales since November. The game is one of many Activision Blizzard titles that show video game entertainment has become a giant business and a cultural juggernaut, and the title is now the best-selling video game of all time after just five months on the market, the company said. Activision Blizzard shares are up 2 percent following the results in after-hours trading.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based game publisher reported GAAP sales of $1.45 billion (up 12 percent) and earnings of $503 million (up 32 percent), or 42 cents a share. That compares to revenue of $1.31 billion and earnings of $381 million, or 30 cents a share, a year earlier. On a non-GAAP basis, earnings per share were 13 cents, compared to expectations of 8 cents a share on non-GAAP revenue of $668.3 million. The non-GAAP revenue came in at $755 million. Black Ops was the No. 1 title in the quarter.

“Interactive entertainment continues to see broader audience appeal and powerful positive trends in online game play and online distribution,” said Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard. “Only a handful of franchises are likely to generate the vast majority of industry profits.”

Kotick said that digital revenues — such as revenue from online game World of Warcraft — were 50 percent of sales in the quarter. Digital revenues were up 30 percent from a year ago. He said the shift toward digital delivery of games is continuing across the whole company.

“We are just scratching the surface on the role digital delivery will play in our products and franchises,” Kotick said.

The company credited Black Ops and World of Warcraft for the strong results. The company also sold 1.4 million units of its First Strike map pack for Black Ops in the first 24 hours after its release in February. That “shattered” previous online downloadable content sales records, said Thomas Tippl, chief operating officer of Activision Blizzard.

Activision Blizzard will face a lot of challenges in 2011, since it will have tough comparisons to Call of Duty sales from a year ago and faces fresh competition from Electronic Arts, which is publishing Battlefield 3 this fall. Activision Blizzard also cut the production of its Guitar Hero line of video games after sales cratered in the music game segment. The company cut back a bunch of staff last quarter and as a result will shave $75 million off costs this year.

Still, Activision Blizzard has a perennial cash cow in Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, an online fantasy role-playing world that has more than 12 million paying subscribers. The company continues to allocate its resources toward its biggest franchises such as World of Warcraft, Blizzard’s next massively multiplayer online game, Blizzard’s Diablo III titles, and other big games.

Black Ops players have logged more than 1.2 billion hours of online game play. Activision Blizzard said that Black Ops is now the top-selling video game of all time for the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the PC. The number of online players playing Black Ops is 33 percent higher than the number that played the prior year’s title, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, for the first five months after each game’s release. The number of quarterly downloads of Call of Duty Black Ops First Strike — the first map pack for Black Ops — was 20 percent higher than the first map pack for the prior game as well. On average, First Strike players have been playing 58 minutes a day in online games since Feb. 1. That compares to 55 minutes a day spent on Facebook.

Activision Blizzard is working on a new Call of Duty game and will release more details in the coming weeks. Once they launch, it will market them with the biggest marketing budget the company has ever had. One of the new Call of Duty titles will be a micro-transaction-based online game that will launch in China.

But the company’s main effort is creating a big splash with its console and stand-alone PC games based on the series. On that front, Activision Blizzard is creating a new Call of Duty digital platform, which will be a hub for Call of Duty fans much like Battle.net is a hub for StarCraft II fans.

The goal, Kotick said, is to make Call of Duty “the must-have entertainment experience of the year.”

In February, Activision Blizzard forecast adjusted earnings of 7 cents per share, and adjusted revenue of $640 million The company’s adjusted results exclude one-time charges and account for deferred revenue on games whose online components reap sales over a long time.

Right now, Blizzard does not know when it will ship its next big game, Diablo III. If it does not ship that game this year, however, Blizzard expects to ship two games next year, Tippl said. In 2011, Activision Blizzard expects GAAP revenue to be $4.05 billion, up $100 million from the prior outlook. EPS will be 61 cents, up 5 cents from earlier estimates. For the second quarter, Activision Blizzard expects revenue of $985 million and EPS of 19 cents. In the third quarter, the only major game launch will be an X-Men title.

Activision Blizzard said it is developing Skylander’s Spryo’s Adventure, a new universe focused on the “world of toys, video games, and the internet.” This game lets you buy toys separately for less than $10 each and then you can use codes to extend the experience online. The idea, Kotick said, is to “bring your toys to life.” Skylander’s is one of the biggest investments Activision Blizzard has ever made in a new intellectual property, Kotick said.

The company revealed the title at Toy Fair earlier this year and describes the game as bringing real world toys into the world of games and online. Users can play with the toys online. A portal transports the toy characters into the game. Then the results of that play are written back onto the toy’s memory so they can be exploited in offline play. The company has been working on this for more than two years with teams from the toy, game, and movie industries. The property will launch in the holiday season.

In the coming quarter, the company expects to have lower revenues in part because of a smaller product line-up and the outage of the PlayStation Network, which has been down since April 20. The Call of Duty Black Ops Escalation map pack is expected to launch on the PSN later this quarter.

One of the new titles being worked on is coming from Bungie, which for now is being referred to as “the new Bungie universe.” Bungie created the Halo series of blockbuster games for Microsoft and has since signed up with Activision Blizzard to create a new game series. Tippl said there are more online-enabled projects in the works than ever before.

Activision Publishing chief Eric Hirshberg estimates that there are 277 million Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii consoles in the market in U.S. and Europe. That will be 312 million by the end of the year, the highest ever in gaming history. By year end, the number of online-connected PS 3 and Xbox 360 consoles will be 92 million, up 24 percent.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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On Tuesday, Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service launched the Black Ops Escalation map pack, with four new maps and one zombie level. Given the timing, Microsoft’s Xbox Live is going to be a big beneficiary of the map pack release. Meanwhile, Sony is suffering two major outages because hackers attacked its PlayStation Network and PC online gaming services.

Consider one very interesting fact that sheds light on just how intensely players are playing this game. Back in December, we noted that 1,619,499,217 assists were made in the game, where one player helps another player finish off an enemy. That was just one month after the game launched. Six months after the game launched, that number is 7,633,268,348. This means that the engagement level of the game has stayed pretty constant for six months. If other games aren’t selling all that well right now, the popularity of Black Ops multiplayer combat could very well be one of the reasons.

Back in November, this game generated $360 million in revenue on its first day of sales. The latest map pack costs 1200 Microsoft points on Xbox Live, or about $15. If Activision Blizzard sells millions of these map packs — which have virtually no costs of goods sold (beyond Microsoft’s 30 percent cut) — the profit generated can be as much as a major blockbuster game.

Activision Blizzard’s latest map pack is the second release of downloadable game content for Black Ops. On Tuesday night at midnight Pacific time, there were 333,316 players online. That was about three times as many as the night before the map pack launched. The number isn’t huge, but it has stayed steady all week, and on Saturday night there were 345,749 players online. It shows that the game still has a pretty committed audience, and the numbers associated with the engagement of fans is pretty amusing.

I’m one of those fans. I’m at the equivalent of level 92 in multiplayer combat. Earlier this week, I had played Black Ops multiplayer for a total of two days, 11 hours and 34 minutes. I had 196 wins and 273 losses. I had a tally of 4,348 kills. I died 5,541 times, for a kill/death ratio of 0.78. My accuracy rate is 15.94 percent and I’ve gotten 324 head shots. My longest kill streak was 9. Multiplayer is tailored for players like me, since you can go from Level 1 to Level 50 as many as 15 times in Prestige mode.

You can laugh at me, but I’m not alone in being obsessed with the game. Some of the numbers associated with the achievements of fans in multiplayer combat are pretty astounding. Players have shared 118.9 million care packages dropped from the sky with their fellow team members. About 2.2 million videos have been uploaded so that players can brag about their exploits. Headquarters units have been destroyed 99.6 million times. Players have been killed 238.2 million times by a ballistic knife. Players have been stabbed in the back more than 517.2 million times. Using their multiplayer currency, players have spent the equivalent of 41 percent of the U.S. GDP. Players have run around the world of the game so many times that it is as if they had circled the globe 132,073 times. And 1,181 billion shots have been fired.

The Escalation map pack has five maps, entitled Zoo, Hotel, Convoy, Stockpile, and the zombie map Call of the Dead. My favorite mode for playing these maps is Domination, where players try to control three different flags on the map.

Zoo is a great map for short-range weapons such as shotguns. The main flag is planted right in the middle of a small plaza area inside an abandoned zoo. You can shoot down on the flag from either side and enter the plaza from four directions. That means the flag is in the middle of a killing zone, and it is hard to take without some real teamwork. There’s a couple of good spots for snipers but the map mostly favors close combat.

One of the best tips for staying alive in this map is to find the entry to get on top of the monorail track that runs through the map. From there, you can maneuver to a bunch of places and have a height advantage over rivals. But it’s pretty easy to see you walking up there and you won’t have any cover if you get spotted.

The Hotel map is pretty similar to the struggle to control the main flag in Zoo. There are long distances where you can snipe at enemies from above. You can shoot down on a drained swimming pool from a second-story window, but you have to be wary of snipers or crossbow-grenade wielders shooting from a similar window on the other side of the complex. There are elevators you can call and enter. It’s fun to put a claymore mine in the elevator and ambush enemies rushing into the elevator on the next floor. The hotel is nicely decorated to look like a swanky joint in Havana. There are plenty of paths for you to run around the enemy and hit them in the flanks. If you stay inside, you can be pretty safe from helicopter, mortar and jet napalm attacks.

Convoy has a similar set up as you square off on multiple levels of a freeway where trucks have been overturned. The setting is a U.S. army convoy that has been hit by a Soviet ambush on a freeway. You fight amid the wreckage.

The middle flag is pretty hard to reach because snipers can watch it from overhead on either side of the battle arena. The distance between the bridges is pretty far, making it hard to get the flag. But you can get to the flag from below through a crack in the ground.

The Stockpile map lets you fight for control of a key building in the middle of a Russian town. The fight for control of the main flag takes place inside one of the buildings where you have to fight in a fairly confined space. Once your side grabs the flag, you can run up to the automatic garage doors and shut them so that it’s harder for the enemy team to take the flag back. Overall, this map has a lot of variety, but controlling the garage doors is key to victory.

The zombie map is okay — but I’ve never been much of a fan of this mode, where you just fight until the zombie hordes take you down. It’s pretty easy to get killed by the master zombie in this level, and quite hard to stay alive for a long time. If you add it all up, it’s all pretty engaging fun for hardcore gamers. The celebrity characters in the level include director George A. Romero, Robert Englund, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Michael Rooker and Danny Trejo.

Check out the funny trailer below, which cleverly says “there’s a soldier in all of us.” The second video is a preview of what the maps look like. Overall, I like these maps better than the first map pack, First Strike. If I had to rate them, I’d give them a 90 out of 100.

Since the video game publisher releases earnings on Monday, gamers are hoping that the new Call of Duty game, the latest in a series of best-selling first-person-shooter combat games, will be announced that day. The E3 trade show is also approaching in June and Activision Blizzard has typically released a video trailer of the next game at Microsoft’s E3 press conference, which takes place on June 7.

Activision Blizzard has begun to tease the title in video game magazines such as The Official PlayStation Magazine. But the details are light. The title could be a Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 game, which is believed to be in the works at the company’s Infinity Ward studio.

This year’s game will face some serious competition from Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3, which is expected to launch in the fall. But Call of Duty remains the game to beat. Call of Duty Black Ops has generated more than $1 billion in revenues for Activision Blizzard since its launch in November. Rock Paper Shotgun, a game blog, started spreading a rumor that Call of Duty Online, a massively multiplayer game or some kind of browser-based shooter game, will be announced on Monday. We don’t know what will happen, but it’s typical for Activision Blizzard to start slowly revealing its Call of Duty plans during its earnings calls.

Meanwhile, I’m busy playing Call of Duty Black Ops Escalation multiplayer map pack, which launched last week. At any given time, there are around 300,000 people playing online when I log into the game. That means that players are engaged in the game still, more than six months after the Black Ops title shipped in November.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Activision Blizzard’s latest map pack is the second release of downloadable game content for Black Ops. And as past map sales have proven, this launch will likely generate as much revenue as a new blockbuster game launch on the consoles.

Right now, there are 333,316 players online. That’s about three times as many as I saw last night. That’s not a huge number, but it’s a given that today is not a great day to launch a rival game. At the moment, there’s nothing in the game that resembles the attack on Osama bin Laden’s complex in Pakistan. But you have to figure that’s going to be on the minds of gamers as they play this kind of intense, first-person shooter game.

Given the timing, Microsoft’s Xbox Live is going to be a big beneficiary of the map pack release. Meanwhile, Sony is suffering two major outages because hackers attacked its PlayStation Network and PC online gaming services.

Activision Blizzard has said users have played the Black Ops game online for more than 2 billion hours since its launch in November. You can expect more Call of Duty fans to log into the Xbox Live service starting today, since they won’t be able to play on the PSN or on Sony Online Entertainment’s PC online games, which were shut down today pending an intrusion investigation.

I’ve actually put 60 hours into the multiplayer combat version of the game, which is second to none, in my opinion. I’m at the equivalent of level 89 (since you can get up to level 50 and then start over again). I picked it up again last night to get back in the swing in preparation for the Escalation launch. Activision Blizzard has timed this launch of new content well, as it will bring back players who have stopped playing the game.

The new map pack will have five maps, entitled Zoo, Hotel, Convoy, Stockpile, and the zombie map Survive. The price wasn’t listed, but previous map pack First Strike was sold on Xbox Live for 1200 Microsoft Points, or $15. (See the smack talk from EA’s chief executive about Call of Duty). First Strike sold more than 1.4 million copies on Xbox Live on its first day of sales.

Call of Duty Black Ops is one of the best-selling video games of all time, with sales of more than $1 billion since the launch in November. Activision Blizzard previously launched its First Strike map pack in February.

Activision Blizzard said some time ago that it had sold more than 20 million Call of Duty map packs, generating more than $300 million in sales. So it’s clear that map packs are a big business, and video game publishers may want to avoid publishing rival games on May 3, since gamers will be a little busy.

On the weekend of May 6, Black Ops players can earn double the amount of experience points in each match they play. Check out the funny trailer below, which cleverly says “there’s a soldier in all of us.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Activision Blizzard’s latest map pack is the second release of   downloadable game content for Black Ops. And as past map sales have proven, this launch will likely generate as much revenue as a new blockbuster game launch on the consoles. Given the timing, Microsoft’s Xbox Live is going to be a big beneficiary of the map pack release and the Sony outage.

Activision Blizzard has said that users have played the Black Ops game online for more than 2 billion hours since its launch in November. You can expect more Call of Duty fans to log into the Xbox Live service starting tomorrow, since they won’t be able to play on the PSN or on Sony Online Entertainment’s PC online games, which were shut down today pending an intrusion investigation.

I’ve actually put more than 60 hours into the multiplayer combat version of the game, which is second to none, in my opinion. I’m at the equivalent of level 88 (since you can get up to level 50 and then start over again). More recently, I’ve stopped playing and am happy to pick it up again now that a new map pack is out. In that respect, Activision Blizzard has timed this launch of new content well, as it will bring back players who have stopped playing the game.

The new map pack will have five maps, entitled Zoo, Hotel, Convoy, Stockpile, and the zombie map Survive. The price wasn’t listed, but previous map pack First Strike was sold on Xbox Live for 1200 Microsoft Points, or $15. (See the smack talk from EA’s chief executive about Call of Duty). First Strike sold more than 1.4 million copies on Xbox Live on its first day of sales.

Call of Duty Black Ops is one of the best-selling video games of all time, with sales of more than $1 billion since the launch in November. Activision Blizzard previously launched its First Strike map pack in February.

As we noted before, if video games are the new Hollywood, map packs and downloadable content are smart ways to satisfy the insatiable thirst that some gamers have for sequels. Instead of coming years later, though, these downloadable expansions to existing games keep players addicted to a recently released title.

Activision Blizzard said some time ago that it had sold more than 20 million Call of Duty map packs, generating more than $300 million in sales. So it’s clear that map packs are a big business, and video game publishers may want to avoid publishing rival games on May 3, since gamers will be a little busy.

On the weekend of May 6, Black Ops players can earn double the amount of experience points in each match they play.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Valve figures out how to widen its audience for Portal 2 — with boots — For Portal 2, Valve’s marketing machine has focused on widening the audience for the physics-based shooting game. And it has hit upon a way to target the female audience — or perhaps just the larger community of boot fans — with its latest game trailer.

Screw you. Pay me. — Most entrepreneurs have found themselves saddled with a client who decides at the end of a project that they want to either renegotiate the terms of the deal or not pay at all. In this video, Mule Design co-founder Mike Monteiro explains how to respond.

New Black Ops map pack is confirmed for May 3 — Activision Blizzard confirmed Wednesday that it will launch its Call of Duty Black Ops Escalation map pack on the Xbox Live online gaming service on May 3.

Valve’s alternate reality game stirs fascination with Portal 2 — In another bid to create interest in Portal 2, Valve created an “alternate reality game” (ARG) to get fans started early. However, the move may have backfired.

SEC may let startups use social networks to raise money — The Securities and Exchange Commission may adopt rules to let Internet-age technologies be used in fund-raising.

And here are five other posts you won’t want to miss:

Glam hits $100M revenue, plans to file IPO as early as fall — The female-focused media and advertising company is said to be in the early process of hiring bankers to help it with the IPO, but won’t file to go public until after the slow summer months are over.

RIM CEO: How come we get no respect? — “Why is it that people don’t appreciate our profits?” Research in Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis asked this week.

Why Google is spending big to advertise Chrome — The company explained in a conference call that “everybody that uses Chrome is a guaranteed locked-in user.”

KiOR looks to $100M IPO to convert woodchips to biofuel — Biofuel company KiOR is going public and wants to raise $100 million for a new plant that converts wood chips to petroleum.

FCC chairman gets heckled by smart meter protesters (video) — Clearly, the question of whether wireless emissions can cause harmful effects such as cancer continues to provoke a passionate response, and some folks don’t believe the research that has been done on the topic.

See our updated post on the map pack debuting today.

Activision Blizzard confirmed today that it will launch its Call of Duty Black Ops Escalation map pack on the Xbox Live online gaming service on May 3. The announcement confirms a previous leak that the map pack, the second for Black Ops since the game launched last November, is on its way.

As proven by sales of previous Call of Duty map packs, the launch of this kind of downloadable content is as huge as a new blockbuster game on the consoles. The company said today that users have played the Black Ops game online for more than 2 billion hours.

I’ve actually put more than 60 hours into the multiplayer combat version of the game, which is second to none, in my opinion. I’m at the equivalent of level 88 (since you can get up to level 50 and then start over again).

The new map pack will have five maps, entitled Zoo, Hotel, Convoy, Stockpile, and the zombie map Survive. The price wasn’t listed, but previous map pack First Strike was sold on Xbox Live for 1200 Microsoft Points, or $15. (See the smack talk from EA’s chief executive about Call of Duty). First Strike sold more than 1.4 million copies on Xbox Live on its first day of sales.

Call of Duty Black Ops is one of the best-selling video games of all time, with sales of more than $1 billion since the launch in November. Activision Blizzard previously launched its First Strike map pack in February.

As we noted before, if video games are the new Hollywood, map packs and downloadable content are smart ways to satisfy the insatiable thirst that some gamers have for sequels. Instead of coming years later, though, these downloadable expansions to existing games keep players addicted to a recently released title.

“In crafting the Escalation multiplayer maps — Zoo, Convoy, Hotel and Stockpile — the team developed them to be distinct experiences in their own right, giving players the variety they crave in both setting and gameplay,” said Treyarch Studio Head, Mark Lamia, in a statement. “And I don’t want to spoil any surprises for Zombies fans, but Call of the Dead takes it to a whole new level.”

Activision Blizzard said some time ago that it had sold more than 20 million Call of Duty map packs, generating more than $300 million in sales. So it’s clear that map packs are a big business, and video game publishers may want to avoid publishing rival games on May 3, since gamers will be a little busy.

On the weekend of May 6, Black Ops players can earn double the amount of experience points in each match they play.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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