Sonicron said:
Please, if I'm wrong about this, by all means correct me... but the guys who were responsible for decisions that pretty much equalled raping the entire PC FPS gaming community up the bum with a big, nobbly stick while pointing their fingers at the sodomized victims and laughing hysterically - those guys have now filed a lawsuit against their publishers despite being guilty of breaking their contracts?
West and Zampella, kindly stop this nonsense and escape with what's left of your dignity, would you?
Except IW was pressured from Activision to create IWnet in order to somehow fight piracy or some upper management bullshit.
I have no doubt in my mind that in this case, West and Zampella are quite probably in the right simply because I don't trust Activision anymore. With Kotick saying he wants to make games "no fun to develop". As well as "invoking a feeling of fear, skepticism and pessimism" in the office, to the whole thing of "anuualizing everything" because it's good for the bottom line - EVERYTHING they do now is about money money money.
I wouldn't be surprised if they canned West and Zampella simply because they were going to have to be payed a lot. I mean look at Activision's press release, it's like it's been designed by committee to reveal absolutely no information about anything at all. Read it, really read it. You learn NOTHING it doesn't actually SAY ANYTHING AT ALL.
I mean, I've been saying for a long while now about how Kotick is ruining gaming, yet only a few seem to listen to me. However, while things are great for Activision now, it didn't take a fucking crystal ball for me to predict that eventually the devs would be fed up with a douchebag making millions of dollars while forcing them to toil in a workplace of oppression. I gave Activision 5 years since kotick took over (in 2008) before it started rotting from the inside. Well, I guess it's starting to happen already.
Activision execs are the kind of people who would eat their own mother to make their share holders happy. West and Zampaella, they're just two nerds who wanted to make a WW2 FPS game and tried to live their dream. Sure they've been exposed to corporate politiking over the years, but they weren't TRAINED in it like kotick is. IMO they just want their dues and to get the fuck out of what is surely a hellhole to work in.
I mean you HAVE to find it a little suspicious that they were canned right before they got their big chunk of royalties. You also have to find it suspicious that Activision conducted a HUGE internal investigation more or less finding some way, any way, to get west and zampella fired exactly before they got their royalties and what's more; no one else in the whole company got fired either. This just fucking reeks of a witch hunt.
Altorin said:
because owning a franchise like Call of Duty means anything. IW made the game. They can make another just like it, and call it Gun Shooting In Urban Environment.
it's like owning a cake box, and firing the baker who bakes cakes to go in the box.
It's about owning something YOU'VE created. Imagine Bloomsbury Publishers pulled this kind of legal bullshit and somehow owned the IP of Harry Potter and J.K Rowling lost creative control over the work. Not only does brand recognition really help sales - Rowling would be fucking heartbroken. This is something SHE created out of hard work and creative thinking (not that a ww2 fps is really creative, but still). These guys MADE CoD. To them, the game is part of them.
I hope activision burns to the fucking ground. I hope this sparks a revolution and the employees who've had their seeds of dissident's planted in them by Kotick for 2 years finally sprout and they all bring forth the injustices they've faced.
