Activision Fires Infinity Ward’s Studio Heads

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Activision has fired the two studio heads of Infinity Ward, Jason West and Vince Zampella, sighting “insubordination” and “breach of contract”. It’s been rumored that there had been tension between the publisher and developer regarding the creative direction of the Call of Duty series. I’m guessing it went something like this:

Activision: Hey Infinity Ward, Modern Warfare 2 sold like a ton of copies. Can you make them faster so we can get more money?

Infinity Ward: Well, yeah…the thing is, we kind of want to branch out with the Call of Duty series and do something different. Maybe a Call of Duty racing game or something. Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is sweet as hell. I don’t know…all these FPS are getting kind of boring, we can’t keep doing this stuff. I mean, did you see that totally over the top Airport level, how can we ever hope to beat that?

Activision: Well, yeah, that’s not going to work. I think we’d rather make a bazillion more dollars. Even better, maybe if you could make four Call of Duty games a year…we could make four bazillion dollars! You like money, right? Oh! Don’t forget DLC, we need to be more aggressive with that stuff. Maybe $10 extra to enable online play or something, that would be totally sweet for us.

Infinity Ward: Fuck you.

Activision: No, fuck you.

(physical violence ensues, security gets called, etc.)

Seems similiar to what Bungie went through with the Halo series. I guess I can understand both sides of the issue, but I hate seeing creativity stifled in favor of a quick buck.

Regardless, I can’t wait to see what happens to the Call of Duty series. Probably not a good thing.

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