Yesterday, a mysterious and questionable video appeared on YouTube showing what looked like a potential membership plan for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. But today, although Activision confirms the video was not a hoax, they’ve also explained it was only showing an Xbox Live glitch and there is no plan to introduce a subscription model to the Call of Duty series any time soon.
“There’s a video that made the rounds today of a 360 player getting a glitchy, incomplete message that uses the phrase ‘Modern Warfare 2’ and half of the word membership,” explained Activision’s Dan Amrich in a blog post. “This video shows just a glitch — since you can access a Live subscription renewal from within the MW2 game interface, it appears some data got jammed between two parts of Live. It’s not a secret portal to some nefarious plot to charge people for COD multiplayer — and there are no plans to do that.”
Infinity Ward community manager Robert Bowling also crushed the rumor in a blog post, writing, “To be clear: There is not, and will never be, additional fees required to subscribe and play Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer.” And just in case you’re worried a subscription fee would apply to Activision’s next Call of Duty, Black Ops, Treyarch also chimed in with a tweet assuring that won’t be the case: “No, you will not have to ‘Pay to Play’ #CODBlackOps Multiplayer either. Rumor -> Squashed,” the tweet reads.