Call of Duty Elite a cash grab ?

Activision Looks For Another Few Bucks With Call of Duty Elite

Activision today has released some details on the new Call of Duty Elite service. With more than 30 million people having played a "Call of Duty" game online this year, with the average player spending an impressive 170 hours a year they have an attentive audience all vying to be the best and now you can be better, for a fee. The new service will allow you to do the following:

1) Connect with people you want to play with
2) Compete in tournaments and events
3) Improve your gameplay with stats and strategy videos with tips for weapons and maps

They will allow users to test the new service for free with Call of Duty Black Ops with the focus of the service being the fall release of MW3. There is two levels of service with a free basic service and a premium one with a rumored $10 / month fee.

Playing on a PC you can already easily join your friends matches using steam and the stats are already available in black ops (although they may be more detailed which is to be determined). The real value to me seems to be in the tournament play (as all tips will be released online the day after it makes it to the Elite service). For console gamers these may indeed be features but why aren’t these already built in as a part of the games initial cost.

We have increasingly seen additional content (DLC’s) being released after a games release. The sad part as we saw with MW2 is that a majority of the content (if not all) was already created at the time of the games release but was left out so they could charge you for it later. To me this was a blatant cash grab of which this new Elite service is a further extension of. I wonder now though what will be new and exciting in MW3 that will justify the upgrade besides just having the pleasure of also paying a monthly fee. Battlefield 3 please do not follow the same route.
So what do you think?

Use the comment section below to let me know your thoughts, is Elite a cash grab or money well spent and a worthwhile addition ?

The release video for the Elite service below:

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Apple Unveils Streaming Music Service iCloud

Apple has officially confirmed a cloud based music streaming service Apple iCloud. It will be officially unveiled at the WWDC keynote speech by Steve Jobs on June 6^th in San Francisco. In addition to the iCloud service we see a definite focus on software with releases of ‘Lion’ the eighth release of the Mac OSX as well as the iOS 5 which powers the mobile platform used by the iPod touch, iPad, and iPhone.

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When Hot Wheels Comes To Life!

Tanner Faust Broke the world record for a distance jump in a four-wheeled vehicle at the Indianapolis 500 on May 29th 2011 The jump broke former record holder Johnny Greaves' mark of 301 feet. The record breaking jump was set with a 10 story drop down 90 feet of orange track and flew 332 feet through the air."

Foust said: "You're basically going down a really poorly designed rollercoaster, because there are no guard rails... We accounted for everything you could imagine outside of the weather."