My mom has always said nothing surprises her anymore; and as I continue to live, I’m beginning to realize what she means. People do things you never thought they’d do, and some say things that’s just totally uncalled for, and irrelevant.
The latest to blast off with loose words is Activision boss Bobby Kotick, claiming the two men he fired from Infinity Ward won’t ever be successful again.
It’s in a wide ranging interview with Edge Magazine the CEO uttered such things. He also spoke openly about the difficult situation that occurred recently at Infinity Ward, saying he knew they’d lose a lot of talent when Jason West and Vince Zampella were fired. Adding it was a tough choice to make, especially as the CEO of a company.
“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 said knowing that most of the people at Infinity Ward were all friends, the damage would be far reaching when the two men were relieved of their duties.
“When we bought the company, they were 20 or 30 guys – these were guys that shared vacation homes together, they were all best friends, they were at each other’s weddings. We knew that when we had to fire Jason and Vince we were going to lose a lot of really talented people,” he continued.
“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.”
Jason West and Vince Zampella are now hard at work on a multiplatform title, one we’re almost sure will see two of the industry’s most talented men once again finding success.
yea right, the way activision continually over saturates their franchises, its not long before people get tired of playing their games. as we all know what goes around comes around. kotick should shut his damn mouth before he jinx’s himself.
Yeah, I know what you mean, bro. It looks like the man’s hurt.
Wow, Kotick, just wow. When is this man going to shut up?!
lol. He thinks so much of himself and his company. COD is going to turn into Guitar Hero. The Guitar Hero franchise is quickly dying and they are doing nothing to make it better. Rock Band is doing some different stuff like using a real guitar now and the game can teach you the actual cords for the song, while guitar hero adds new songs and a few new things. COD will become old eventually.
Yep, and it’s because they’re milking it too much. Kotick needs a break, really.
got to love it how he tries to make it as if they were the bad guys.
ok, they did some things they should not of which my understanding is they were in talks with EA of leaving activision and were going to meetings during work hours.
using company PCs to email EA and things like that, i think thats what got them fired.
but activision were holding back royalties IW were owed in their contract so activision are not innocent angles either!
would be really interesting to see what really happened, i mean to have security storm the office the day they got fired obviously activision were scared of employees leaking new game info or company tools.
will be interesting to see what comes of the law suit, if that brings any light to the situation.
Yeah, and we’ll be watching closely.