To elaborate on the nature of Call of Duty's microtransactions I mentioned above:

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has Supply Drops (http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Supply_Drop ). At the game's release, you get Supply Drops every few multiplayer games, which have chances of dropping cosmetic gear for your character, or weapons with statistical modifiers. (naturally, you mostly got cosmetic gear). While the weapons w/ modifiers were technically balance, some weapon modifiers synergize a little too well with a given weapon and they became the most-used weapons in the game.

Then Infinity Ward added the ability to buy as many Supply Drops as you want for $1.99 each.

(Later, they did implement daily challenges for a bonus Supply Drops along with Prestige challenges for the good weapons, in order to make things more fair.)

Infinity ward didn't make Call of Duty Advanced warfare, it was Sledgehammer games. Everything else seems to check out though. I'm a Sledgehammer employee that worked on the Daily Challenge feature.

Ah, something felt off as I wrote that. That makes more sense.

Guess what. All the CoD players will pay and praise the company as someone who finally got free-to-play right. Just because they like the franchise. The same happened with Fallout Shelter and you can see people arguing that micro-transactions in FS are fair - when it's the same thing that Candy Crush and similar games pull.

My estimate is that Blizzard will make this money back in less then 5 years. They just need to put the proper money-milking free-to-play model into their next big game and all the "core" gamers will shell out the money.

After that, we will see the entire industry shifting to free-to-play and the way games are currently monetized on mobile will dominate PC as well.

If I were Google, I'd start developing AdSense plugins to Unity, Unreal and other game engines.

>They just need to put the proper money-milking free-to-play model into their next big game and all the "core" gamers will shell out the money.

Just wait for Overwatch.

The only way to win is not to play.

Indeed. Their eula is the worst contract I have ever read, and most of it could not be enforced in Europe.

The best part must be the claim that they own all Accounts, which means everything you buy using online transactions is not yours.

Actually, Activision suffered from that when they were controlled by Vivendi. But since Vivendi is no longer in charge their games are improving by a lot.