Nerd Mentality

Activision and Infinity Ward: A Tale of Two Suckers

Posted March 6th 2010 by Frankie Aguilar.

So I'm sure anyone who was interested by this title knows a little bit about this whole situation but for those of you who are curious/unaware here it goes. Mega gaming company Activision has been in the business of buying up/merging with top tier companies for a while, starting with Raven studios way back in '97, and most notably Vivendi (basically for Blizzard) in 2008. Most of the time when a huge corporate machine buys up smaller awesome companies, and I'm looking at you EA, they do so for the IPs, not for the people. This cutting out the fluff mentality has lent itself to trouble, with the mass layoffs of Blizzard employees post merger, which totaled close to 300, causing quite a stir. More recently, Activision has come under heavy fire for its handling, or mishandling, or what it calls "breaches of contract and insubordination" by senior employees at Infinity Ward. Infinity Ward, which was bought by Activision in 2003, is the developer behind the insanely popular Call of Duty franchise, whose most recent outing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, was the biggest entertainment launch in history.

I can't begin to understand the number side of any of this, besides that to most top level CEO type cats, that's all that matters. If they can move that decimal point one spot to the right, they've done their job. What bothers me though is what goes on to make these things happen, and the lack of transparency that goes along with them. What these disagreements generally devolve into is no more than middle school he said, she said politics that make the parties involved look like a bunch of teenage girls. Activision posits that the senior employees of Infinity Ward that they fired held meetings with other publishers. What happened in these meeting is still unknown. The "top men" from IW retaliate with tales of unpaid royalties for the blockbuster COD:MW2. They have since (March 5th) filed a lawsuit for said royalties, and the rights to any future COD games.

Initially I was furious with Activision for this nonsense. My inner high school freshmen, pent up with adolescent fury bolstered by RATM CDs I downloaded from Kazaa, felt like "the man" was keeping my people down. We've all seen things like this before, whether it be forcing RED vs BLUE to sell out to continue making their machinima, or the divergence of Guitar Hero into two different yet exactly the same franchises, it's always been money based. And even when I found out that the IW dudes were possibly shopping themselves around I thought, good for them for trying to get paid. But when I sat down and thought about it more, it's just two sides crying foul, but eventually saying the same things about each other. I've always believed that you never have patience for annoying things that others do, because you hate those same things about yourself. It would be nice if we lived in a world where we could just see Activision as the big nasty fat cats, and IW as the righteous little guy, but they both pray to the almighty dollar.

Not to sound like a QB at the end of a football career, but at the end of the day everything is a business. If I was in charge of creating one of the highest grossing and fastest selling medias of all time, I'd be looking to collect my paycheck immediately. That being said, I feel for the legions of COD players that might be affected by what might turn into a long arduous court battle over the rights to the franchise. Here's hoping that this all gets sorted out, and these juggernauts get back to making games sooner than later.

| Comments (10) | Permalink