EA may announce Call of Duty: Elite competitor soon

This isn't going to go down well. EA's given Call of Duty: Elite's mix of free and paid-for features its seal of approval, with CEO John Riccitiello hinting at the possibility of a similar service for DICE's Battlefield series.

While he stopped short of naming names, Riccitiello's praise during last night's investor call had a clear object. "When we look at what we do and what our competitors do, there are a number of examples of [what] I would call the best work of our industry in terms of making this work.

"Frankly, I gave a compliment to one of our competitors. It's got a subscription on the back end of an FPS title. I think that's a best-in-class performance.

There are precedents for learning from rivals, he added. "We study all of these, and by way of example, when we put [FIFA] Ultimate Team out there, we had a competing idea with Madden, none of which I'm sure - none of whom I believe on the call would even know the name of it because it quickly faded and it was replaced with Ultimate Team because we're learning from best practice.

"So the reason this is such a fast-growing revenue stream for us is we're identifying and implementing best practice across the range of our products, and you'll see lots more to come including an announcement near term that Peter just alluded to."

The announcement alluded to will take place next week, and concerns Battlefield 3's "constant flow" of downloadable content releases. Don't jump to any conclusions save the bleedingly obvious ones.

Battlefield 3 already has Battlelog, of course, an entirely free community platform which supports features like stat-tracking and messaging.

Thanks, CVG.