The scary case of Infinity Ward

    Ok I shouldn't have posted that cause now the thread is getting derailed. Interviews are interviews and the details don't concern everyone here. Besides I am under NDA with them. Now that I realize it I'm under so many NDAs it's a miracle I can even say something about anything

    Bottom line, I respect Jason and Vince's track record a hell of a lot more than I do Kotick's and I wish our Mapcore brothers at IW all the best through all that crap. This week surely couldn't be good, and it will be some time before it all clears up again.

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    at any rate this has shown me that i won't bother working for activision, ever.

    lol. whenever i need a good laugh, i just have to look for Senturas posts.

    Those bullet points don't mention one interesting claim that I saw, which was that in the contract Activision had with West/Zapella the IW guys were given exclusive control over the Call of Duty series past the Vietnam era, with Activision not allowed to make a game past then without written concept from IW's heads. This was an agreement in exchange to get IW to make Modern Warfare 2 in the first place. IW had started planning to move on to their new IP/new setting past Modern Warfare post MW2, as per what their contract with Activision allowed them to do.

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    ":2b8547r7]Yes, Peris works at Blizzard and he sounds happy.

    From what I've heard Vivendi/Blizzard is the bigger half of the Activision Blizzard merger. I don't think anyone has to worry about Blizzard anytime soon.

    Supposedly, by Activision's payout schedule (which I also remember being the case years ago at Raven), they should see payout at the start of April. Supposedly. Which also supposedly factored into the decision to dump West and Zampella now, so they wouldn't have to pay them (which is also why they appear to be trying the "with cause" route instead of "without cause," which would likely leave them still eligible for some amount).

    So hard to actually know what's going on But I would wait a couple weeks before freaking out that all of IW isn't getting paid. If they haven't been paid in solid gold moneyhats by mid-April or so, then there's more trouble.

    Royalties at internal game studios at most major publishers work like this:

    1) Release a game, which by default is either in calendar Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. (Jan 1 to Mar 31 = Q1, Apr 1 to Jun 30 = Q2, etc)

    2) At the end of the following quarter after the game releases, studio employees get whatever royalties they earned against previous quarter sales according to the contract or royalties agreement.

    In the case of MW2, the game released around Nov 10, 2009..and it sold millions and millions of copies world wide between Nov and Dec 31, 2009. After Dec 31, Activision's royalty department calculates how much royalties IW staff should get. Those royalties for Q4 2009 would normally be paid at the end of Q1 2010 which is March 31 or April 1 depending on the fine print.

    Assuming this is still how Activision does it (fairly safe assumption) we're still in royalty limbo until the end of March. Just have to wait and see what happens.

    Er...ya...basically what KFS said.

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    I was surprised to hear they did not want to work on MW2. If a lot these allegations are true, pretty shitty of Activision.

    It just sounds to me like IW is actually populated by intelligent people.

    $15 for five maps doesn't seem all that crazy ridiculous to me, unless they're bad maps or something. It's not like there's some alternate source of maps for Modern Warfare 2 after all

    I don't think the price is that bad if you're still really into the game. I've fallen off the MW2 train, it's all about BC2 for me now. However if you're still totally into MW2 then it's probably a price worth paying, even if two of them are repackaged COD4 maps The one taking place in an apartment complex, which there was a loading screen picture released/leaked of, looked pretty cool.

    Still slightly irritated with the way things went after I got the COD4 DLC tho, really wanted to try out the maps and every time it was about to change to a DLC map everybody vetoed it. As a result I maybe played the COD4 maps 3 times each, since apparently no one else wanted to try out the stuff they paid extra for. Sigh.

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