The $35 Billion Franchise Crumbles Under Pressure

Call of duty is one the gaming world’ most cherished mission-critical games. The franchise is estimated at around $35 billion. A game that transformed from WWII shooter to a cultural phenomenon, Thursday’s collapse was apocalyptic for that. Every title crashed during the Thursday night peak hours from 7:59 onwards. For a franchise that takes pride in its military precision and well-executed multiplayer infrastructure,  the outage exposes that the most state of the art tech property remains vulnerable against a single point of failure. 

A digital House of Cards

Activision, the California based game publisher, has a digital house of cards that is crumbling in the face of technical malfunction. The outage was not restricted to COD only, it included other activision products as well, such as Crash Bandicoot and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Normally, smaller scale game studios run better and uninterrupted operations than a gigantic corporation. Otherwise, maybe that’s the problem, activision’s title has got so much audience that they have started neglecting the planning of how to cater hundred of thousands of players when they rush to their platform simultaneously in a peak hour.  

You Need Their Blessings

Remember the good ole days of owning a game cassette/CD and showing it off on your shelf like an artifact? Yeah, those days when owning The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Halo 2, Final Fantasy VII was proof that you’re a real deal game-head, but it also meant that you need any server authentication, internet accessibility to play the game.

It was your to play wherever you like and whenever you like. Not anymore! Now, everytime you wanna play the game online, go to the internet log in to prove your identity and you need the server’s or in a way company’s permission to play the game. If they’re having a problem then remember you’re part of it and forget about paying the game. 

The Me Time Vulnerability

Games are supposed to help the players steam off their entire day’s frustration and anger. An outage occurred at 7:59, the prime time when most people finish off their work, dinner and feel in the mood to play a couple of “ME-Time” missions, but to their utter disgust that’s exactly when the game went off. A better execution should’ve been planned to manage and foresee the amount of traffic at this hour. 

Thursday’s meltdown serves as a staunch reminder that modern gaming convenience comes with a hidden fragility. With everything becoming cloud-based, we’re building an infrastructure on digital quicksand. The publishers and developers have to carve out an offline feature and stop putting players on the whims of network stability.