If there's one thing you can say about anti-game campaigner and UK Labour MP Keith Vaz, it's that he is tenacious in his fight against games. This week MP Vaz raised his fourth early day motion aimed at violent games, this time specifically targeting Activision's recently released Modern Warfare 3.

Beachhead Studios, the development team in charge of the Call of Duty Elite social and stat-tracking network from Activision, are promising that the service will be fully operational by December 1. In a recent interview with G4TV, vice president of production Daniel Suarez says that he accepts responsibility for the widely reported problems with the service since its launch.

As part of its latest financial results games retailer GameStop revealed that it sold well over a half-a-million Call of Duty Elite subscriptions. The Call of Duty Elite subscriptions were a big hit at GameStop stores, mostly due to the November 8 launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Elite sales certainly helped GameStop's digital business, which the company expects to exceed internal expectations of $450 million for the current fiscal year. So exactly how many Elite subscriptions were sold? According to GameStop, right around 600,000.

Activision says that it "misspoke" earlier this week when it said via Twitter that Call of Duty: Elite support for the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 probably wasn't going to happen.

"We are working towards a universal Elite experience but we cannot guarantee if or when a version will be available for the PC," Activision stated via its CoD: Elite Twitter account yesterday.

Activision's social network that launched with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 continues to have problems. Call of Duty Elite, the much vaunted social and stat tracking service is still experiencing problems and continues to prevent players from logging in. The service has been operational sporadically since launch, which Activision has blamed on what it is calling "over subscription to the servers." The service's level of operation is often listed as 'intermittent,' much to the chagrin of players who are paying for it.

Sledgehammer game is finding itself on the business end of internet hate after one of its developers encouraged fans to manipulate the user ratings for Modern Warfare 3 over at Metacritc.com. Sledgehammer Games lead Glen Schofield tweeted to fans asking them to bring the game's paltry 1.7/10 score up. Critics have been generally kind to the game, giving it an average score of 8.9/10.

Because of all the issues at launch Activision announced that it will give one month of free time to all Call of Duty Elite subscribers. Activision's social network built around tracking statistics various Call of Duty games, launched this week with the release of Modern Warfare 3 on Tuesday. At launch the service suffered from a number of issues and continues to be online sporadically.

Modern Warfare 3's day one sales - based on Chart Track and retailer figures - are right around 6.5 million units in the US and UK, raising an estimated $400 million in revenues for Activision. These numbers make Modern Warfare 3 the biggest entertainment launch of all time, beating the previous record held by Call of Duty: Black Ops which had an estimated day one revenue total of $360 million. Of course, this comes as no shock to Activision, whose last two Call of Duty games broke sales milestones in their first day of release as well.

The 31-year old Aurora, Colorado man arrested and charged for disorderly conduct earlier this week after allegedly threatening to shoot Best Buy employees and blow the place up over Modern Warfare 3 purchase problems says that he is shocked at how much attention his story has gotten on the internet and that the words he used were just a figure of speech.

A man threatened to blow up his local game store yesterday after they informed him that they had sold out of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, according to police in Aurora, Colorado. Aurora Police Det. Bob Friel said that 31-year-old Lomorin Sar was arrested early Tuesday morning after he threatened the employees at the Best Buy at North Salida Court.

Analyst Sebastian Colin of Baird Equity Research says that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will break records today.

Two armed robbers managed to steal 6,000 copies of Modern Warfare 3 in France, according to multiple news reports. According to published reports (as translated by Eurogamer), at 8:00 AM on Sunday morning a car crashed into a van 10km southeast of Paris. The van was carrying unspecified video game cargo worth €400,000.

According to Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter, Activision's Modern Warfare 3 will sell ten percent more copies than Call of Duty Black Ops. He estimates that the game will rake in $1.1 billion in its first six weeks on store shelves. Pachter also predicts that the Call of Duty Elite premium service could pull in up to 4 million subscribers by the end of the year. Of course, he probably didn't know at the time that it wouldn't be available for PC users. That may throw a wrench into the gears of his calculation machine.

If you somehow managed (by hook or by crook) to get a copy of Modern Warfare and are trying to play it online via Xbox Live, you'll be treated to a ban. The game officially launches November 8, but apparently Microsoft has noticed that some Xbox Live users have the game and are trying to play it online. Those people are having their accounts banned.

Just days before the worldwide release of Modern Warfare 3 (November 8), Activision has decided that its Call of Duty Elite service will not launch on PC alongside the game - according to an MCV report. The company did not reveal when it expects the service to be ready either.

If the fight between EA's Battlefield 3 and the Call of Duty series is a popularity contest than EA is losing, according to online usage stats released by Xbox Live's Major Nelson. According to his list of most popular game being online for the week, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 are more popular than Battlefield 3. This might give EA some pause considering that these are very old games beating a game just barely released this month.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is set for release on Nov. 8, but the PC version of the game is already in the hands of pirates, according to this VentureBeat report. The PC version of the game (or at least the single player portion of the game) is being sold from pirate circles around the country. Apparently the pirated version of the game originated from a shipping warehouse (run by a huge shipping company) in Fresno, California.

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter loves to make predictions, and when he does, he goes big. Two of the biggest games this year - Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 - are set to launch in North America and Pachter has a big number that he believes both games will hit. Pachter believes that Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 will generate more than $1.4 billion combined by the end of the year.

GameStop UK has an interesting trade-in offer that will give consumers across the pond Modern Warfare 3 for 0.99p. All they have to do is buy Battlefield 3 before October 27, then buy Modern Warfare 3 before midnight on November 7. If consumers who bought Battlefield 3 send it back to GameStop UK before November 18, their GameStop accounts will be refunded for MW3 minus £0.99.

Infinity Ward's creative strategist Robert Bowling says that the studio has learned some hard lessons about online cheating from previous Call of Duty games, and is taking extraordinary measures to make sure that there is little (or at least less) of it in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. To that end, Bowling says that MW3 will have dedicated teams monitoring online activity and dealing with anyone foolhardy enough to cheat.

According to Activision its Call of Duty fan event, Call of Duty XP, was a smashing success and the second most viewed televised event in history. Speaking to IndustryGamers, Activision Publishing's top executive Eric Hirshberg said that they were delighted with how the event turned out and proud of the milestones it earned.

Infinity Ward founders Jason West and Vincent Zampella finally have a trial date in their long-running lawsuit with Activision. Their court battle with Activision over royalties allegedly owed from the Call of Duty series is set to go before a judge in Los Angeles on May 7, 2012.

"I’m really looking forward to having our day in Court," said Zampella in conversation with Forbes.

Zampella and West founded a new studio, Respawn Entertainment, in 2010, signed a deal with EA, and have hired over 60 employees.

Activision has prevailed in a fight with the owners of ModernWarfare3.com, a website that first came to light in July because it lampooned the Call of Duty series and Activision - and redirected visitors to the official Battlefield 3 site. Clearly a violation of naughty internet rule 370.

Ignoring calls from Activision to tone down its rhetoric, EA Label boss Frank Gibeau says that - for the first time - the Call of Duty series will face the first real competition it's had "in a long time."

Gibeau bragged that DICE's upcoming FPS shooter Battlefield 3 will "definitely" take market share away from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 this Christmas.

According to Activision CEO Eric Hirschberg, his company has sold in excess of 18 million Call of Duty: Black Ops map packs to date, and the average Black Ops player spent $76. That is a pretty impressive number by anyone's standards. The sales figures were released by Hirschberg during an investor event in Los Angeles yesterday. While it's a dramatic improvement over the last Call of Duty game (World at War sold 9 million map packs at $10 each with an average spend of $68 per player in its first nine months of release) DLC for the series always does well.

Valve Software announced today that Activision's next Call of Duty game will use Steamworks. On a related note, over the weekend at PAX in Seattle, Gearbox Software's Randy Pitchford revealed that the PC version of its role-playing game shooter, Borderlands, would add Steamworks support with a new update. The PC version of MW3 will be powered with Steamworks for both the digital and retail versions of the game. It will support offline play, auto-updating, achievements, and dedicated servers at launch. Naturally Steamworks adds a DRM layer as well.

EA's trash-talking to Activision about its Call of Duty franchise may be frowned upon in some circles, but Scott Steinberg of TechSavvy Global sees it as a clever ploy on the company's part to draw attention to its Battlefield series.

While Activision's new CEO said earlier this week at Gamescom that EA should stop trash talking Call of Duty because it "hurt the entire industry," one of EA's top executives has a different point of view. The Battlefield publisher threw some verbal jabs at Activision's former AAA franchises and predicted that the Call of Duty franchise would collapse "In 2-3 Years."

"Welcome to the big leagues Eric," EA spokesperson Jeff Brown said in a comment issued to Kotaku addressed directly to Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision.

Activision's CEO of publishing, Eric Hirschberg, has publicly criticized EA for what he calls "mud-slinging tactics" over the rivalry between the Modern Warfare series and Battlefield 3. According to Eurogamer, Hirschberg took some time out of his Gamescom keynote to encourage Activision's competitors to focus on development, rather than making negative comments in the press.

The very public face of Infinity Ward says that his company does not take offense when people that (seem to) hate Call of Duty criticize the game. Instead, the man in the public trenches for the wholly-owned Activision studio takes those complaints and finds useful feedback to help his company build a better game.