Call of Duty Elite Closing This Week

Activision have today announced that Call of Duty Elite – the season pass/play monitoring software that was launched in the run up to Modern Warfare 3 and then mostly ignored when Black Ops 2 was released – will be shutting down this week. Anybody who has logged into the servers since January this year will receive double XP.

From the Activision support FAQ on the closure:

As noted back in October 2013, Call of Duty® Elite was designed to work with prior Call of Duty® games and has begun winding down support for those titles since late last year, which ends on February 28, 2014. We’ve taken all the key learnings and fan feedback to create the Call of Duty® app for Call of Duty®: Ghosts, which takes some of the best and most popular features of Call of Duty® Elite and introduces new elements such as Call of Duty® Clan Wars.

This was a long time coming. The features of Elite have quickly been taken out and used elsewhere. The Season Pass thing was an optional, one year thing, and has since been available separately on the store. Similarly, stat and clan services have been placed into the Call of Duty companion app. 

Call of Duty Elite has often been negatively compared to Battlefield’s Battlelog service,but really it never had a chance. Support dropped off quite quickly after Modern Warfare 3, and it was never really a necessary part of the Call of Duty experience.