With the ongoing legal battle between Activision, Infinity Ward, and former employees of the firm, neither side can really discuss anything in great detail regarding the drama which ensued earlier this year.
However, with the amount of folks exiting Infinity Ward in the first month or so, it had the gaming public wondering if Activision could recover from the loss of talent.
According to the firm’s CEO Bobby Kotick, people were clamoring to fill the vacant positions.
“We’re in the video game business,” he told Joystiq. “If we can’t replace twenty-five people, that would say something pretty disappointing about us as a company. There’s no shortage of talented people who want to work on Call of Duty.”
When asked why the company didn’t just fill vacant positions left with folks from Treyarch and Sledgehammer, Kotick said to do so would have been detrimental to those teams.
“Well there’s at least 60 or 70, super-talented, amazingly capable people who are there,” he said. “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.”
It’s been reported by the firm that over 5,000 resumes have been submitted for positions at Infinity Ward, and with responsibilities for the Call of Duty franchise being divided with Treyarch, calling the Black Ops developer “the B-team” is not a correct assessment.
“That’s an unfair view of Treyarch,” said Kotick. “You know it’s not really an objective view. Treyarch contributed so significantly to the multiplayer technology that’s in Modern Warfare 2 and they didn’t really get the credit for that.”
With Black Ops becoming the “biggest entertainment launch in history” and selling over 1.4 million units in its first day on sale in the UK and 4.2 million in the US, Kotick’s view of Treyarch is probably spot on.
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