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A Letter to Activision

Writer's picture: ByrdmanByrdman

Dear Activision,

I have been a faithful patron of games published and developed by you since I had to go to GameStop with my mom so she could purchase them for me. I have made a career that supports my family comfortably that I can directly correlate to my time spent playing your games.

Now my feelings for you border resentment.


If you would entertain me for a moment, I would like to muse:


I have taken games seriously for a long time. I bought the best monitors, the best consoles, the best controllers, the best graphics cards all because of the time in the past spent playing Activision titles and more specifically, Call of Duty. However, life changes and you have to pivot. Recently my wife and I got a puppy and it’s no secret that a puppy is a full time job. Well, my office is upstairs and stairs, carpet, and a puppy in the beginning stages of potty training is a bad mix. This means that since getting this sweet pup, I have not set foot in my office where all of my gear is. That’s ok because like I said, that’s life and sometimes you have to pivot.


In order to make sure this pup is taken care of, I make sure to spend all of my available time downstairs with her and my wife to make sure everyone is taken care of and I do not resent a single second of it. In the spirit of “pivoting”, I have come down off of my high horse and am using a a basic Xbox Series S on a basic 60hz TV with a basic controller in order to find a balance between gaming and responsibilities. Am I out of my element as the creature of habit that I am? Absolutely. Would I change the position I’m in right now? Absolutely not.


So I have gone back to my gaming roots; playing single player games, Call of Duty Zombies, maybe a multiplayer match or two, and older games. Frankly, as I have thought on this situation, I have appreciated the perspective it has given me. However, this is the point where it turns to frustration.


Call of Duty released another major update adding a new season of content and maps for multiplayer, new guns, and even a new zombies map. Apart from the fact that, yet again, they put out another update that was righteously unstable and introduced a lot of bugs, I was excited to see that a new zombies map came out. I was especially excited because during this busy time, zombies is the perfect thing to get my gaming fix on while being able to quickly pivot to take care of the pup. And if we’re being honest, zombies are about as “return to my roots” as it gets for me because I have been playing that since I was a very young kid.


So I find a few minutes of downtime to load up the newest zombies map and about 10 minutes in, pup needs to go out. No problem. Pause the game, do the business, come back and continue. However, as soon as I pause I see a….timer? Yes, a 15 minute timer. This timer tells me that I only have a total of 15 minutes to pause throughout the entire time of playing the game. Mind you, this is a single player game where it is just me casually playing something that can take hours upon hours to complete the story of or you can just mindlessly play and mow down zombies. But no, I have 15 minutes of total time to pause a solo game because they decided that they want to be able to control how players play something they’ve been playing for nearly 20 years. Apart from the hackers on the multiplayer side and all the other anti-consumer things they have done recently, this right here might be the single most egregious and disgusting practice I have seen them do yet.

We used to leave our consoles on overnight so we could sleep and then get back to grinding zombies. I’m playing a game alone, do not force me to play to your rules because you want to save pennies on server usage. That is garbage and blatantly anti-consumer. Make it local like it was for nearly 15 years.


You, Activision, have complained time and time again about the player base and used it as a justification to implement poorly integrated skill based match making and other things that take the game out of a native and level state and then you pull this? What if someone has a kid? A 15 minute timer and then they have to restart everything they had done up to that point? You don’t care about a balanced experience, you just hate the demographic of people that are the least likely to buy things in your store. It’s disgusting how simple it is.

Every single thing you once stood on, you killed, buried, a spit on the grave of.

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Rightside Media was created by  Phil Williams, a former Alabama state senator, retired army Colonel, and practicing attorney.

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