14 DAY TRIAL // Bobby Kotick, the boss of Activision Blizzard, has shared some more light on the whole Infinity Ward controversy, which prompted studio founders Jason West and Vince Zampella to leave and start their own studio, Respawn, for Activision rival EA.
The Activision boss revealed that he felt betrayed when he saw what West and Zampella did with Infinity Ward and that he didn't have a choice.
"It shook my belief in two specific people, who were my friends," he said. "The frustrating thing about that is, the stuff that these guys did, I never would have expected them to do. We're a public company, we've got ethics obligations, and the things they did were... I would go to jail if I did them."
"You can't use the company and the company's assets for your own personal benefit, and you can't use the leverage that you might have for personal benefit - you're not allowed to do that! And so we didn't have any choice."
Kotick reveals that this one of the toughest decisions he had to take as a CEO, but he is sorry that the employees who left Infinity Ward, with West and Zampella in the lead, will have a tough time becoming successful in the future.
"That's one of those really difficult decisions as the CEO of a company, where you step back and say, 'No good is going to come of this. They're going to leave and probably have a really hard time ever being productive or successful ever again, and we're going to lose some talented people, and there's nothing we can do about it.' And there wasn't."
This doesn't mean Infinity Ward is in any trouble, as Activision received "something like 5,000 resumes" for the positions that were left empty by the mass exodus.
West and Zampella's Respawn Entertainment is already working on a new game, that will be multiplatform and be published by EA.