Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 officially launched earlier today and so did Call of Duty Elite, the online community for Activision"s first person shooter series that"s available for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. Everyone knew the game would be extremely popular, but it looks like Activision underestimated just how many gamers would sign up for the service.
In a post on the Call of Duty Elite web site, Activision states, "Registration requests for our new live service Call of Duty Elite are exceeding even our most optimistic expectations, which is creating a bottleneck and some players have not been able to register."
It added, "We have already registered hundreds of thousands of players and we are working around the clock to increase our capacity as quickly as possible .... Please be assured your gameplay data is safe and that whenever you successfully register for Call of Duty Elite, all of your data will be waiting for you."
It sounds like the problems with Call of Duty Elite are mirroring those for the launch of Battlefield 3 a couple of weeks ago. The military shooter from Electronic Arts also suffered from server sign up and multiplayer issues for its first few days, although EA managed to fix those issues by the end of the first week.
With some analysts claiming that Activision may have pre-sold as many as 9 million copies of Modern Warfare 3 before it was even released earlier today, you have to wonder why the publisher wasn"t better prepared to deal with the rush of new players coming online to sign up for Call of Duty Elite.