Activision on quantity of Call of Duty Elite subscriptions, fixes

Activision has said they’re around the clock to bring Call of Duty Elite back to full service following outages pertaining to the amount of subscribers the service received.

Speaking to Joystiq, the company’s VP of production Daniel Suarez explained:

The high demand from the console application and registration on the website from the PC really crippled the registration and login process which then translated into the backend servers being slammed. So we’ve been working around the clock to alleviate access into the system and we’ve had a large number of people now able to register. We’ve resolved that piece of it and now we’re actually working on getting the service back up and running to a point where poeple can then enjoy it.

We knew MW3 was going to be big and we planned for a big demand, it’s just the infrastructure is struggling to keep up with volume. We did a beta, the beta was intended to give us the data on how everything would behave with people hitting different parts of the service and different parts of the site. But when you add the complexities of it being not only an online service but one that has a console component, a PC component, and a soon-to-be-released mobile component, all being released at the same time, it’s never been done before at this scale. We know we’ve got this Founder’s opportunity, the ability to do double XP, and a lot of that drove people wanting to log in and register and be part of it. So I can’t say that’s what caused this. From the planning standpoint, we planned for it to be big. It’s Call of Duty, we have all our metrics. We know what our metrics are from Black Ops and MW2 and all the previous Call of Dutys, so we were planning for it to be big.

But we just literally had so much influx right now from all the different areas, from the console and the web. It just hit us a lot harder than we thought. This is not the Elite experience we want people to have. This is not what everybody worked two years plus for. This is not what the Beachhead Studios guys poured their heart and souls into. And we’re all committed. I don’t think there’s a bigger priority right now within Activision than to try and get this back up and running as quickly as possible

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 released worldwide on November 8th.