If you fancy hanging out with a few thousand Call of Duty fans for a weekend, Activision has you covered.
Activison has announced that it will hold a two-day fanfest for the Call of Duty games called Call of Duty XP. According to the publisher, the event is along the lines of BlizzCon, Blizzard’s annual convention, but will be a very different event, as befits a very different game.
The event will take place in Los Angeles on September 2nd and 3rd, and it sounds like Activision is rolling out all the stops. As well as attractions like paintball, Activision promises Triple A music talent and a massive CoD tournament featuring a million dollar prize. There will also be demo kiosks where attendees can try out Modern Warfare 3 and real world replicas of CoD locations that they will be able to visit.
There will be 6,000 tickets available, priced at $150. Activision’s Eric Hirshberg said that the ticket price was somewhere what you’d pay to attend BlizzCon, and what you’d pay for Comic Con, and that it represented fantastic value for money. “If you attend any AAA concert, that’s about what you’d be paying,” Hirshberg said. “So we think we’re providing tremendous value that’s really unreplicable [sic] anywhere else.” The proceeds from the event will go to the Call of Duty Endowment, a charity that supports returning veterans and helps them find work.
It doesn’t take a math whiz to realize that Activision is probably going to make a pretty hefty loss at the event. Even If it sells every single ticket, that’s still only $900,000, not even enough to cover the tournament prize money, let alone hiring a venue, acts and all the other costs. But while Call of Duty XP might not make money in its own right, as a marketing tool for MW3 and Call of Duty as a franchise, it will do just fine. Tickets go on sale on July 19th.
Source: Gamepro
