A mysterious and questionable video was uploaded on YouTube recently. The video showed a potential membership plan for Modern Warfare 2.

Yesterday, Activision confirmed that the YouTube video was not a hoax, as it was thought. It also mentioned that the video only showed an Xbox Live glitch and the company don’t have any plan yet to start a subscription model to the CoD series in near future.

Dan Amrich from Activision said in a blog post, “There’s a video that made the rounds today of a 360 player getting a glitchy, incomplete message that uses the phrase ‘Modern Warfare 2′ and half of the word membership. This video shows just a glitch — since you can access a Live subscription renewal from within the MW2 game interface, it appears some data got jammed between two parts of Live. It’s not a secret portal to some nefarious plot to charge people for COD multiplayer — and there are no plans to do that.”

Robert Bowling, the community manager of Infinity Ward, also crushed the rumor. He wrote in his blog post, “To be clear: There is not, and will never be, additional fees required to subscribe and play Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer.”

No more to wait. The new maps of Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC will be finally ready for gamers to play. It contains three new maps and two renovated one from the original MW.

Originally the Resurgence Pack was released on June 3 on the Xbox 360. The release was part of an deal between Activision and Microsoft and so Xbox users got the map pack a month ahead.

The three original maps are Carnival, Trailer Park and Fuel. The modified versions are Strike and Vacant.

Carnival is a set in an abandoned amusement park. One will find in it many buildings, high points and also multiple pathways. The Trailer Park map is in more confined area. The map thrives on close quarters ambush points. Fuel map pack is in fact the largest map in the game. This map is located in an oil refinery in the desert.

On the PlayStation, recently released, the Resurgence Pack will cost $14.99.

Modern Warfare 2 sales crossed 20 million copies worldwide confirmed Activision. Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision, told to analysts in a pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo that the forthcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops of Treyarch may get higher sales than what Modern Warfare 2 achieved before its released date, even so early.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is getting released on November 9 this year.

Kotick added further that the CoD series became more successful gradually with each title. He also added that the preorders of Black Ops are already tracking higher than the MW2’s advance sales at the same time.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released on November 10 last year.

Activision has targeted a good and strong move in the pre-owned game market. The company believes that it is worth about $1500 million a year.

The company is finding more sense in working with the current retailers instead of opening its own used game business.

It seems that Activision, each months, is swimming in cash since the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was launched last November.

In the first quarter the revenue of Activision experienced a 33% year-on-year growth $1.3 billion USD. $381 million USD was pocketed by the publisher, which is double of what it experienced during first quarter of last fiscal year.

The credit to such boost in the growth goes to Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft. In Europe and North America the MW2 was the top selling game for the first quarter and the recently launched Stimulus Package DLC sales topped one million downloads in a single day.

Well, there is also the issues of troubled inhouse studio Infinity Ward. While addressing, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, said that any firings were not made “without a great deal of deliberation about the consequences”.

He said that the firing of IW co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella was not a plan to deprive them of the royalties, but in fact it was an effort to “protect the company’s assets and the interest of our shareholders”.

In a recent press release, Activision discloses some of the information about the new map pack of Modern Warfare 2, the Resurgence Pack.

According to the release, the Resurgence Pack is being released on 3rd of June on Xbox Live. Well, the release did not mention anything about the pricing part of the map pack, but definitely some assumptions can be made if we consider about how many people threw down their hard earned benjamins for the last pack.

It may be probably charged 20 bucks. Below are some of the more details of the map pack which was briefed by community manager Robert Bowling:

Carnival - Bowling said that this map is set inside a “desolated amusement park”. He adds further that Carnival map has unique locations such as fun house and rollercoaster.

Trailer Park - According to Robert Bowling, Trailer Park is a cozy map that features abandoned trailers and also tight corridors.

Fuel - Bowling says that Fuel map is like a “sniper haven” and it is based in an oil refinery.

We know that this year there will be a launch of new full length Call of Duty: Black Ops videogame. It will be released on November 6, but before that we are going to enjoy the new map pack of the biggest selling Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 of last 2009.

It seems that Activision is having some more new plans that is linked to the successful franchise.

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick told to the investors after the first quarter results announcement of the company, “There’s a soldier in all of us.” He added that the company is always trying to enter growing gaming markets across the world. He said, “The popular global fantasy of being a soldier is allowing us to enter new geographies, leveraging… expertise… creating content for audiences that to date have only been satisfied by Blizzard games. Soon we’ll announce our plans for both China and Korea.”

He also added this new content is planned for MW2 as well as for the Black Ops.

Kotick added further that until now over 17 million map packs of the entire series have been sold and this is more than what the other franchises even sell in their entire launch history.

Well, MMO titles dominate the Korean and Chinese gaming markets and the World of Warcraft has a strong presence there.

We all know that the “Stimulus” Map pack of Modern Warfare 2 is already picking up too much of controversies. So, logically we knew that Infinity Ward would go ahead and doing it all over again.

Yes, they are doing.

At the Q1 2010 report calls, Activision speaks of releasing a second map pack soon. Though it is still unnamed, but it is learned that late this year the map pack will be released.

This is really a good news for all those gamers who enjoyed the first one because one may expect the second map pack to be more good.

Well, this is the one side of the game. The other end says it is not surprising to see Activision moving ahead for another cash-grab.

However, the pricing details have not been spoken by the publisher. The kind of content is also not known. Moreover, no official dates been announced.

The first DLC was sold for $14.99. It was titled as Stimulus Package and was sold on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Activision’s first-quarter results may beat all the expectations. The key products for this unexpected result are “World of Warcraft” and “Call of Duty” franchises.

Activision blizzard has benefited from the grand success of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ after its release last year in November. Accordign to the company, the online update of the game boosted its sales too much in the first quarter.

Activision is recognised as the largest standalone game publisher in the gaming industry and its success graph has risen northward above much of the turmoil in the market. The full credit goes to the blockbuster titles.

Well, analysts have a different say. Some of them noted that the its roster of games for 2010 appears tepid. According to Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, even though it was the fast start for the company in 2010, but the consumer economy remains shaky. This is due to its majority of games are not expected to launch until much later this year.

Not only this, the shares of the company have slipped about 1.3 percent to $11.75 in afternoon Nasdaq trading on last Thursday. Before this, the shares rose about 7 percent this year.

It is well known that the Crysis 2 will be having state-of-the-art visual razzmatazz. We also know that fans are also looking to have a good story in it.

It was recently announced by Crytek that Richard Morgan has been hired to write the story of the new series. Morgan is an award-winning author of science fiction novels such as Broken Angels and Altered Carbon.

On the occasion he said, “Video games are one of the only things in my life I would qualify as a complete addiction… The medium has every bit the potential for exciting and emotionally charged storytelling as literature and film, and I’m excited to explore this format on my first project in partnership with a world class developer like Crytek.”

Richard Morgan, however, thinks that video games have vast storytelling potential. While talking to the media, he had a few critiques for the writers behind MW2. He said, “I thought Modern Warfare 2 was an immense disappointment. It was a massive step down from CoD4.”

He added further, “What I thought when I played it was, ‘Jesus guys, what have you been doing? You’ve not ramped anything up. The story is worse and the game doesn’t really hang together, it’s just a bunch of mission levels.”

A new and fresh offer arrives the market for the buyers of Modern Warfare 2. Microsoft Corp. now offers a free pair of virtual Infrared Goggles with each purchase of MW2 in the Xbox Live division of the Xbox 360. The offer began this week.

Henseforth all the users of Xbox Live can download this Infrared Goggle DLC item without any extra cost. This item will be adding to Xbox Live Avatar a pair of Infrared Goggles.

This week, Activision Blizzard also released MW2 Stimulus Package DLC. This package contains five multiplayer maps that includes Bailout, a multi-level apartment complex; Storm, an open industrial park littered with heavy machinery; and Salvage, a snowy junkyard fortified by stacked debris and crushed cars.

War-torn urban environment Crash and the Overgrown that features a massive dry creek bed also returns from Modern Wafare.

According to global sales statistics, Modern Warfare 2 has sold 15 million copies, which was released last year on November 10.

This month Microsoft started the sale of the Xbox 360 250GB Hard Drive at $129.99.