The Beachhead Studios service simply did not work. Its status up until now has been continually set as “intermittent” as many gamers try to sign up and login to no avail, and for those who purchased the premium membership or bought the hardened edition of the game, they may not have been able to claim their founder status by the original deadline (now extended). Despite these issue and the service not working as planned, Activision is proudly announcing that they’ve received over 4 million sign-ups with over 1 million players purchasing the premium membership.

The most shocking fact is that they reached this milestone in just six days, destroying the launch numbers from subscription services including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Sirius XM and Xbox LIVE, which all took a year to reach this number. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick elaborates on the popularity of the service as its launch:

Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg explains that the service is now up and running, reiterating that Founders will get the extra 30 days free to make up for the first few weeks of service instability.

No matter what Activision does here with Call of Duty, they’re winning big and we’re not sure if this is good considering that Call of Duty Elite hasn’t proven itself yet and Modern Warfare 3 has taken the most flak from vocal gamers out of the last few annualized releases for being “more of the same.”

Because of the Call of Duty Elite issues, Activision has extended the eligibility of acquiring “Founder Status” for the service to the end of this month and have stated that the service will be up and running 100% on December 1st, a week short of a month after the release of Modern Warfare 3. For those who subscribed to the premium membership, they’ll be getting a month added to their subscriptions.

So, the service should be up and running for the holiday season but for its first month when some gamers will be playing it the most, it wasn’t there and that’s quite a disappointment, especially considering how many other games a lot of us are trying to make time for. Read our Modern Warfare 3 review to see if it’s something you should seek out.

Call of Duty: Elite is available now on the PS3 and Xbox 360 and should come to PC at some point in the future.

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Source: Activision