14 DAY TRIAL // A set of new e-mail based messages that have been added to the on-ongoing law suit between ex Infinity Ward leaders Vince Zampella and Jason West and their former parent company Activision suggest that executives from Electronic Arts tried to get them to delay the release of the first map pack for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in order to give more retail chances to their own Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
Activision says that Lincoln Hershberger, who is the senior director of global marketing at EA, sent an e-mail which reads, “A couple months ago, I asked Vince to hold back their map pack until after we launched (he owes me one). Given that they've already made a billion, he was cool with that, obviously Kotick took it as being belligerent.”
The mail reached important Electronic Arts executives like Jeff Karp, senior vice president of marketing, Sean Decker, EALA general manager, Patrick Soderlund, senior vice president at EA Europe, and Frank Gibeau, who is the president of the EA Games division.
The e-mail supposedly went out on March 3, 2010 just as Activision was announcing that Zampella and West were outed from Infinity Ward.
Jeff Brown outlined the official position of Electronic Arts, telling Gamasutra, “This was obviously sarcasm. It's clear from the email this was a joke and they never spoke. We explained this to lawyers at Activision -- who apparently don't have much of a sense of humor.”
Activision has used the newly unveiled messages to allege that Electronic Arts has been actively working to undermine the very successful Call of Duty franchise in order to gain competitive advantages for its own Battlefield series of first-person shooter games.
As a result, a court in California has allowed Activision to add, in an official manner, Electronic Arts as a defendant in the lawsuit that it has already launched against Zampella and West.