14 DAY TRIAL // Activision Blizzard head honcho Bobby Kotick has just revealed that his company's Infinity Ward studio is still quite capable, even after its founders, Jason West and Vince Zampella, and some of its staff left the developer this spring.
As hardcore fans will no doubt remember, West and Zampella, the founders of Infinity Ward, arguably Activision's most important studio, being responsible for the massively successful Call of Duty franchise, left the company and started their own studio, Respawn Entertainment, after having signed a partnership with EA, Activision's biggest rival.
The founders cited unpaid royalties and many other faults made by Activision, while the company sued them for not meeting milestone and not respecting their contracts.
All these problems haven't made an impact on the rest of the Infinity Ward team, at least according to Activision Blizzard's boss, Bobby Kotick, who just talked about how are things going at the Call of Duty developer.
"We're in the video game business. If we can't replace 25 people, that would say something pretty disappointing about us as a company," Kotick revealed. "Well there's at least 60 or 70, super-talented, amazingly capable people who are [still] there. They shouldn't have to suffer for the bad actions of a couple of guys."
"They have a great culture; they're really good independent thinkers; incredible technology base. They can get support like they did from Treyarch, from Demonware and other places."
When the whole Infinity Ward scandal broke, and after it resulted in West, Zampella and a portion of the senior staff quitting altogether, many voices in the industry claimed that it would be the end for the studio, and that the innovation which made it famous would all but disappear.
According to Kotick, however, that's far from being true, but we'll just wait and see just what the studio can do when it reveals its next project, probably next year.