If you want “personalized” 3D audio while gaming, well it’s time to pay up apparently.
Call of Duty, the franchise that makes around a Billion dollars annually, is now asking users if they want to spend an additional $20 for better, personalized, audio. Content creators on X have revealed that upon opening the game a prompt appears asking if you’d like to buy the new spatial audio feature.
The new audio features utilizes a third party service called Embody, which will dynamically offer a personalized audio profile based on your ear size and shape. For $20 you get the service enabled for 5 years, on a per game basis.
Call of Duty isn’t the first one to offer the feature in their game as Final Fantasy and Cyberpunk, among others, have recently added it in as well. But neither of these games abruptly alerted you to the gamepacks upon boot up, nor were they truly encoded into the games overall settings.
While it’s always great to have new options, it is a pretty scary overall situation with how costly gaming has become. If this service takes off with Call of Duty, then publishers will likely see that people will pay for basic services. Games already offer 3D audio profiles that console makers, and publishers, typically eat the cost of to use. Dolby Atmos, and Sony spatial audio, are enough to a typical gamer, but imagine if these features were locked behind a paywall….
Sony already makes it nearly impossible to move game saves from one PS5 console to another without paying for PS Plus. Call of Duty has a $100 version coming out, and then within the game you are paying for season passes and content drops. Games have generally gone from $50 to $70, already making the selection pretty hard when buying a new title.
It would be one thing if the added feature was substantially better than what was already offered, or something totally new and high tech to warrant the cost. However based on some reddit posts, it doesn’t appear the service is even worth the cost, let alone cutting edge.
Can gaming survive if we need to start paying for audio profiles? What if that expands to unlocking frames or personalized visual profiles? What if the whole “pay to win” mentality is stretched really far? Publishers have not been shy about quick cash grabs, which included online passes and used game codes….. How many games have unneeded season passes and in-game coin stores now?
It would be best if we as a whole group of gamers, and Call of Duty fans, openly reject this offer.
