It's only a matter of time, I think the only reason it's not already the standard is the question of 'how'. Will it be $10 a month to play COD? Will it be spread over all Activision games? Will it be just pay to play tournaments with prizes? etc.

 I personally think we'll see a month subscription to a publishers network service, say $10 a month to join EAlive or something. For that we can play any EA game online but all the DLC stuff would now be offered for free too and maybe give game discounts and stuff. 

 It's a tricky question, but when you look at what people are paying for on various Facebook apps clearly they can squeeze alot of money out of the millions of people playing games online.

I will tell you thisd if this happened then Only one game from each genre would actually be succesfull.

I cant see people paying money to play online for like 3 different Shooters. Only one would someone pay for in my opinion. Same goes for other genre's

Doing this would kill the gaming industry in my opinion.

This is just stupid. What next? People who watch movies have to pay extra if they watch it more often then someone who can only watch a film once ot twice then gets sick of it?

Fucking perfetic. If that was the case then i would be bancrupt from the amount of times i have watched harry potter

I get the feeling that if something like this were to be implemented, it would be the beginning of a downward spiral. At first, charging a subscription for online multiplayer might seem innocent enough, but then some publishers will get the idea to start forcing people to use their subscriptions by gimping the single-player mode even further, maybe even removing it entirely. Then they might even do away with splitscreen or local multiplayer as well, meaning you would now have to pay $60 for an online-only game that you would also have to pay a regular subscription for, and that's not counting things like map packs and new content.

Yeah, this is really the worst-case scenario here, but knowing certain publishers, it wouldn't surprise me if this ends up being the route they take.

The day Nintendo force a 'pay to play' service for Mario Kart, is the day that I turn my back on online gaming almost certainly never to come back

Oh well. If this happens it means the focus will shift back to story based, immersive gaming which imo, was much better. I'll take a great 30 hour story with achievements/trophies then playing the same game month after month on the same maps while having to endure 14 year old racist idiots.

they'd prolly end up making less money than they do now if they do that on PC, but console supporters love being sheeps as far as I can tell.

i would stop playing games online if this were to happen

I don't think i'll stop playing games, just the ones that have multiplayer.

Patch is so dumb i doubt most WOW addicts who pay Blizzard to play go out and buy new games all the time, Activision-Blizzard makes 1.5 billion a year on WOW subscriptions, if WOW was free there would be 1.5 billion more $ in consumers hands to spend on new games

The thing that worries me about this are the consequences on the market as a whole.  That money from the pay to play model comes from somewhere, which is consumers pockets.  Continued updates and bug fixes have to come from somewhere too, which is from the work of developers.

Less money in consumers pockets plus more work for developers in supporting old games equals less new games.

I see this as a way for the big publishers to make it more difficult for the little guy to get a foothold in the market.  It preemptively squashes new games, and creates an established market for your own.  I don't see this as a good thing.  Sure it will be nice if you like the few games that this may benefit, but I think this would cause the industry to stagnate as a whole.