Call of Duty Elite will change substantially with each new Call of Duty

Clans are popular and evolving in Call of Duty Elite. The online service developers are also looking toward tablets and the next game as they continue to evolve.

The Call of Duty Elite online service continues to evolve, adding new services as it grows, but the changes we've seen so far are nothing compared to what will happen when the next Call of Duty game hits, Beachhead Studios tells Vox Games.

Call of Duty Elite launched last year as a sort of one-stop shop for everything Call of Duty. You go there to track your stats, to analyze weapons and maps, to tinker with character load-outs and inspect enemies and allies. There's even a growing list of unique video shows.

Last month, Activision rolled out Clan Operations, matches that allow clans to compete directly against one another. Clans, Chacko Sonny, studio head at Beachhead Studios, are an important and growing part of Call of Duty Elite. The service already supports 670,000 clans. The first Clan Operation drew in 25,000 of them to compete. That's more than 200,000 players, Sonny said.

That clan audience, he added, is among the most passionate of their already passionate audience. An audience they pay very close attention to. That's why the team is already looking at ways to improve Clan participate. Some ideas include adding the ability to host sanctioned clan tryouts, giving clans the ability to create draftbooks of potential recruits and maybe allowing for clan lieutenants who can help manage the organization.

Sonny talks about this, the importance of mobile Elite (He says what they're doing with tablets could help define the road map for Elite for the next couple of years), and how dramatically different Elite 2.0 will be when it hits for the next, still unannounced, Call of Duty game in our short interview with him during the Game Developers Conference last week.

"For Elite sort of 2.0, if you want to think of it that way, we’re focusing on increasing that level of in-game integration that we’ve already done with Modern Warfare 3," Sonny said. "We want to take it to even the next level for whatever we do for the next game."

Even off camera Sonny declined to say what exactly that meant, but it sounds like one thing they're talking about doing involves making mobile platforms a much more active part of playing Call of Duty games and using Elite.