Mike Griffith is the CEO of Activision Publishing (pictured above taking a flamethrower to your discretionary income). He doesn't make the company's games, but when he talks about ways to get more money from you, you better sit up and take notice. And when he says this in front of a group of financial analysts, you know he's not fooling around. Here's what Edge Online reports he said earlier this week to an assembly of financial analysts:

We'll qualify more opportunities to increase the monetization of these activities.

The activities in question are online games of Call of Duty 4. Griffith speciously notes that the average player has spend "nearly five full 24-days online". Although I suspect Griffith has a pretty strange definition of "average player", Activision has clearly noticed that you play a lot, and they haven't made one thin dime off you for it. So they want to sell you more stuff when you hopefully start playing Call of Duty 5 when it's released this November. They also figure this is a way to keep you from selling your game used and depriving them of a retail sale.

Griffith expects three times the amount of downloadable content for sale in Call of Duty 5. That's a very specific number, and that's a lot of map packs. The million dollar question is how much this will impact the amount of content in the retail game. Developer Treyarch can only do so much work. Will some of it be cut from the game and held until after the release? And will all this stuff for sale splinter the multiplayer community by spreading it across multiple instance of people with and without certain maps?

Griffith also referenced the "Day One Advantage", which sounded awfully mysterious until a Call of Duty community manager explained that it's just a pre-order bonus:

Mentions about Day 1 content are actually a reference to what the marketing guys have been calling a "Day One Advantage" or a "Tactical Edge," a program we have going with Gamestop. Users who pre-order Call of Duty World at War with Gamestop, or who buy the collector's edition from them, will get immediate access to a high-level rifle (for pre-orders) or LMG (for collector's edition) that other players will have to unlock via ranking up in multiplayer.

It looks like Activision is take a cue from Electronic Arts, who played similar tricks with arms dealing in Battlefield: Bad Company.