Yesterday, it was reported that Infinity Ward’s CEO and CTO (Vince Zampella and Jason West, respectively) left the company under fairly unclear circumstances.  All we knew was the following:

  • Activision’s human resources department had concluded an investigation into claims of “breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward” and that the result would be the “departure of key personnel.”
  • Zampella and West updated their LinkedIn profiles to say that they no longer worked for Infinity Ward
  • Tim Schafer continued to be awesome (see previous post on this story)

There have been some details strewn about in various articles (mostly found on Kotaku) that seem to shed some light on the whole mess, and I’m going to do my best to compile them.

The short version seems to be what most people probably expected: Infinity Ward viewed the Call of Duty franchise as their baby, and didn’t like the way Activision was turning it into a cheap whore.

But to make the picture a little clearer, let’s go back to November of 2008.  On the 6th of that month, Joystiq reported on a conference call with none other than Activision’s Emperor Bobby Kotick, during which he continued to show how the video game industry is nothing more than a series of numbers and bottom lines to him.  Quoth Joystiq (emphasis mine):

When asked about the Vivendi Games franchises that were tossed aside when Activision consumed the company (e.g. 50 Cent, Ghostbusters and Brutal Legend) during yesterday’s conference call (transcript via Seeking Alpha), the Big Kahuna said, “With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of over time becoming $100 million plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us.”

Kotick said that there’s only been a “small single-digit number” of new, successful franchises in the last five or 10 years, and that properties they work on are those that “we know if we release today, we’ll be working on 10 years from now.” He cited rising development costs as a factor in this conservative business strategy.

This pretty tidily sums up Kotick’s “purely business” view of the creative industry he oversees, and it’s pretty damn evident that he’s serious about this strategy being implemented.  Treyarch was hired to give Infinity Ward an extra year of development time on their Call of Duty titles, which was, of course, the smartest move — I shudder to think how much worse CoD games would be if it was left to one developer to release a title every year.  It’s important to point out that while the term “exploited” in the business context shouldn’t carry exactly the same negative connotation we normally attach to it, the unapologetic way in which Kotick promises to force-feed the market in every way imaginable more than makes up for that.

However, as I mentioned above, the aggressive release schedule seems to have left a sour taste in the proverbial mouth of Infinity Ward, particularly because of other developers being added to the franchise, and the friction between IW and Activision started to heat up.  Kotaku reported yesterday that “a source familiar with the studio told [us] that Infinity Ward has long bristled at the notion of any studio other than IW making a Call of Duty game.”  This resentment seems to be a chief contributor to the tension between the developer and their publisher.

A mere 24 hours after Joystiq’s Kotick article was posted, Infinity Ward’s Liar-in-Chief Call of Duty Community Manager Creative Strategist Robert Bowling made a post on his blog with some nasty words for Activision’s “Senior Producer managing Call of Duty” Noah Heller.  Not surprisingly, the blog post is no longer available, but luckily Kotaku has an article about it which will be preserved for posterity.  It would seem Mr. Bowling got his panties in a bunch over an interview Heller had with CVG in preparation for the release of Call of Duty: World at War.  In this interview, Heller claimed that World at War‘s bolt-action rifles were one-shot kills, whereas Modern Warfare‘s were not.  Mr. Bowling responded thusly:

WTF are you talking about?! “in previous Call of Dutys blah blah blah”. First of all, you didn’t work on “previous Call of Dutys”, so don’t talk as if you’re down with how / why things were designed the way they were. Second, you’re completely fucking wrong.

Bolt Action rifles are one hit kills in every Call of Duty we (Infinity Ward) made!!

Sounds like Bowling’s a little bitter about more than just bolt-action rifles…He goes on to say:

A rule of thumb I like to use is…. when promoting your game. Promote YOUR game. Don’t compare it to another game, or reference what OTHER games did in the past, pitch YOUR game. I mean, you have lots of cool things you could talk about… like Nazi Zombies….

This is actually decent advice.  The developer (or, in this case, publisher) should promote their own game without unnecessary comparisons.  The problem is that gaming “journalists” seem to have shorter and shorter memories these days, so they certainly aren’t going to make the comparisons.  As a result they come off as little more than another cog in the marketing machine.  But I digress.

Ever the professional, Mr. Bowling concluded (again, emphasis mine):

Can you guys please stop interviewing this guy, talk to someone who actually works on the Dev Team at Treyarch and knows what the fuck they’re talking about. Not Senior Super Douche Noah Heller from Activision – who apparently has never played the game and doesn’t even work at the developer.

Yikes.  It certainly is a “creative strategy” to call what I have to assume is your boss a douche on the interwebs, but this seems to have been the prevailing attitude toward Activision at Infinity Ward.

Perhaps more fuel for IW’s fire, Kotaku reported in the article mentioned earlier that they have “continued to hear from sources that Infinity Ward wanted to make either a new intellectual property or a game set in the future — the two projects might be one and the same — but that Activision resisted that.”

So why did all of this come to a head with the release of Activision’s annual report?  My money’s on it having to do with the publisher’s plans for the Call of Duty franchise, announced yesterday.  This involved the formation of a “dedicated [Call of Duty] business unit that will bring together its various new brand initiatives with focused, dedicated resources around the world.”  And what exactly will this “business unit” be responsible for over the next few years?  Why, crapping out as many CoD titles as they can, of course!  There’s already Treyarch’s next installment, scheduled for some time this year, but they’re aiming to make 2011 a particularly fruitful one, with the planned release of not one, but two titles.  One will likely be more of the standard CoD-fare, but the other, being developed by the recently-acquired Sledgehammer studio, is apparently going to bring “the franchise into the action-adventure genre.”  This delightfully ambiguous description immediately makes me think of some kind of third person Splinter Cell-type game, though obviously it could be just about anything.

The grounds for dismissal likely had something to do with IW’s previously mentioned desire to change gears from either the CoD franchise or the modern setting or perhaps both.  If that’s the case, I’m assuming that Zampella and West were unwilling to do so, and were therefore in some way breaching terms of their contract.

Why is this such big news?  Well, in the annual report filed with the SEC, it was also revealed, unsurprisingly, that a whopping 68% of Activision’s revenue in 2009 came from only three franchises: Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Guitar Hero (to further highlight Blizzard’s desire to play it safe with StarCraft II, the same document states that WoW accounted for a mind-boggling 98% of the developer’s revenue last year).  With WoW subscriptions reportedly having hit their ceiling some time in 2008, and Guitar Hero (and music games in general) quickly slipping in sales (GH sales were down 35% in the last quarter), forcing layoffs and a scaling back in number of releases (“only” 10 versions scheduled this year as opposed to last year’s 29), Activision are turning their greedy little hands to the udders of their other cash cow: Call of Duty…because they clearly learned nothing about over-saturating the market with uninspired nonsense.

Like it or not (I don’t), Activision is one of the powerhouses of the gaming industry right now.  What they do in the next few years will, for better or worse, have a huge impact on the gaming landscape as a whole.  Can IW’s next Call of Duty reach the heights of Modern Warfare 2 without the heads of the studio that got it there?  Will it matter?  Only time will tell.