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Activision pay former Infinty Ward wages after MW2, but still take the piss with ex-studio heads; Activision = FAIL
Topic Started: May 18 2012, 11:56 AM (266 Views)
TheOneInYellow
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CallUpChuck, correctly, reminded me that I's stupid and posted in the wrong sub-forum about the following topic; I thought any CoD stuff should post in the CoD thread in the Game sub-forum, but the topic in question is current events, so the bulk of the original posts should been here in this sub-forum, with a follow-up text in the CoD game fourm.

Sorry... :cries: :bag:

However, I will reprint the posts here (with some modification aka WALL OF TEXT), but please, discuss the topic here as well, and leave the CoD game thread as is (and talk about CoD games in that thread instead).

Here goes:




Posted Image

Why fail?

This: Activision pays $42m to Infinity Ward staff (please read).

In summary:

Edge Magazine 15.05.12
 
"Activision has handed a check for $42 million (£26.1m) to lawyers representing former staff at Modern Warfare developer Infinity Ward."
:omg:
:faint:

This is great news!!! :yay: :dance:


However:

Edge Magazine 15.05.12
 
"Polygon's source claims that this was not a settlement payment - rather, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick agreed that the evidence it holds against former studio heads Jason West and Vince Zampella didn't implicate the staff who followed them out of the door...

"Activision argues that the pair were fired because they were holding secret talks with rival publisher EA about setting up a new development studio. The case goes to trial on May 29."
So yeah, Activision and CEO Bobby Kotick are still :penis:

:stab:




UPDATE: Activision and EA settle Infinity Ward suit (please click link).

Again, to summaries:

Edge Magazine 15.05.12
 
"Activision and EA have settled a lawsuit over the latter's alleged courting of former Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella. The pair's legal fight with Activision is, however, still headed to trial."

&
Edge Magazine 15.05.12
 
"The case will be put before a jury on May 29, and with the trial date rapidly approaching Giant Bomb has obtained a court filing in which West and Zampella accuse Activision of effectively spying on them in a bid to turn up evidence of wrongdoing to justify their being fired.

The filing says that Activision commenced what was codenamed Project Icebreaker a few months before the release of Modern Warfare 2. It was initially meant to improve relations between Activision and the Infinity Ward heads, but contingency plans were in place should those efforts prove fruitless. Which, of course, they did.

It focuses on Thomas Fenady, former director of IT at Activision, who is now with Warner Bros. He claims that in the summer of 2009 Activision's then-chief legal officer George Rose told him to "dig up dirt on Jason and Vince" because "we just want to get rid of them."
"

This is getting quite serious, as if it is true, then Activison really has broken several laws, lied deliberately (and knew they lied), and broke contracts, alongside with, effectively, stealing money that should have been owed to employees (as they have already paid some wages recently, as described in my earlier bump post).

Shocking. :eek:

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Deadpool Psycko
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That does indeed suck. I mainly see it as more of a CoD franchise kind of thing. This is why I rarely get into a companies quarrels. It takes the product of the games we play for fantasy and dilutes it with reality. :wall:

That's just me though. :blink:


I can't deliberately hate on a company though when they've offered me so much. Perfect? :coffee: Far from it. Entertaining? :cheer: Very much so in a percentile of 70/30.

I remember a Ghostbusters game a ways back made by Activision that was pretty awesome for its time, of course.

They hit high marks with the Spiderman Movie Games...which we all know movie to game adaptations rarely pass success rates. Shattered Dimensions was another hit/miss title but it had potential. I'm curious to see how the upcoming film/game correlates.

Doom 3. Granted, you could give iD more credit but Activision was still playing a part. I very much enjoyed Gun as a Western-genre game until the glory of RDR. Marvel Ultimate Alliance is still one of my fav comic mash-up games. Haven't played yet but I heard Singularity was amazing and more Bioshocky than Bioshock 2 was compared to it's predecessor. Prototype series is another favorite that instills the comic-sandbox mayhem that I adore so much. And fnally, Transformers. Again, more High Noon Studios to get the cheer here but Activision picked a smart partnering here.
It's like EA. I HATE EA unless it's a Sports game OR one they fully develop/publish IE (when they were partnered with Westwood) Command & Conquer and Dead Space most notably.

This isn't so much of a defense of Activision but I know people boycotting JUST b/c of the whole IW deal and that just doesn't relate to me enjoying a game at my leisure. As well, I don't go out for that Elite extras crap either so idk how much that adds to it but...yeah :flower:


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Deadpool Psycko
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And for the record, EA has THE worst servers on just about every game they partake in.


They tacked onto Army of Two and Mercenaries 2 and Co-op searching with a friend was like taking a sobriety test if you were a drunk, deaf, blind and dumb paraplegic.


God mother fucking damn it....
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ASLANS R0AR
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Secret Contract Between Activision and Bungie??
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Deadpool Psycko
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I still consider the big issue to lie with Infinity Ward rather than ALL of Activision.

Most people are going to see this and write off Bungie just for being associated with Activision. This is why I barely get into Dev/Pub controversies and battles, much as I <3 controversy, this never plays out well for the creator or the gamer.
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Scruff 815
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I have opinions, but I lack time. Soon...
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Deadpool Psycko
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Scruff 815
May 22 2012, 07:29 PM
I have opinions, but I lack time. Soon...
Posted Image

Very soon??
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ASLANS R0AR
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Deadpool Psycko
May 22 2012, 06:31 PM
I still consider the big issue to lie with Infinity Ward rather than ALL of Activision.

Most people are going to see this and write off Bungie just for being associated with Activision. This is why I barely get into Dev/Pub controversies and battles, much as I <3 controversy, this never plays out well for the creator or the gamer.
I certainly won't write off Bungie for their association with them, I just thought the story was interesting. I'm pretty indifferent to the whole thing. There are much bigger things in the world to get angry about.
:twss:
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Deadpool Psycko
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Exactly how i feel. With most of these issues, you're still paying retail for your product and chances are, it's going to be at minimum, worth the money in the long run.

I play a LOT of games, most of which over a decent period of time. I ALWAYS get my moneys worth b/c I choose to. I could always bitch and moan and nitpick every little thing that pisses me off (one of my core annoyances with Halo fans among all) but then I'd have a much larger library of emptiness.

As I said, it's more of a COD/Infinity Ward deal b/c they both go hand in hand. Activision is much wider than JUST COD. That aside, it's like writing off Michael Bay as a pure shit director b/c of the way Transformers came out. The man did Bad Boys for chrissakes!!!

Bad Boys
The Rock
Armageddon (debatable)
The Island

3/4 guaranteed fantastic movies IMHO.

Nobody gave Sam Raimi shit for driving Spiderman into a shithole.
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ASLANS R0AR
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haha - good points! For similar reasons I still really like M.Night Shamalamadingdong even though he ruined Avatar :)

"Signs" still freaks me out :eek:
Edited by ASLANS R0AR, May 23 2012, 03:56 PM.
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Deadpool Psycko
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The Sixth Sense
Unbreakable
Signs
The Village

Were all amazing to me and his best work IMHO. People are sketchy with The Village...but I LOVE that concept! It's something I would do with my current disdain for modern society.

Devil was really good too. Nothing spectacular but shows he's not fully fizzled out.

I only like Last Airbender so much b/c it's still the real Avatar. Not that bullshit blue-skinned Pocahontas rip off with a million dollar budget. Disney did it better anyway. Except I would totally boing Neytiri.
The one thing that turned me off was the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon dance/fight stuff but the visuals about it really impressed me. I just didn't like Aasif Mandvi. Just an unconvincing bad guy.
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Scruff 815
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Guys, we have a movie thread for a reason.

Dragging this bitch back on-topic.. I'm a firm believer that every company is evil to some degree, so you should be super-selective with the companies that you boycott, because if you boycotted every company for every bad thing they did you'd be boycotting EVERYONE. Although I try and avoid Sony and Apple, I only actively boycott Walmart (and by association Asda) and Activision. I know that my boycotting makes zero impact on their profits and their businesses and such, but it does mean that when I get upset about something they (as companies) have done, I at least don't blame myself in any way for giving them any money.

I hate Activision so very much. Obviously there's the Infinity Ward stuff, but then there's also these fine Bobby Kotick nuggets:

"We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."

"We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."

[Ghostbusters and Brutal Legend] "don't have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million franchises. … I think, generally, our strategy has been to focus… on the products that have those attributes and characteristics, the products that we know [that] if we release them today, we'll be working on them 10 years from now."

On the high cost of the Tony Hawk RIDE board and assorted Guitar Hero peripherals: "You know if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further."

All this said, these are just my reasons for not buying Activision. There's also the handy fact that they haven't released anything since Geometry Wars 2 that I'm interested in, and there's nothing on the horizon that I care about either. If other people want to buy Activision stuff, fine by me, I'm not going to lecture people and tell them where to spend their money. But I do enjoy a good bitch about Bobby Kotick from time to time. :thumbup:
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Deadpool Psycko
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It's not like we were discussing the movies in detail and so on. They were just for example.

That's why I stopped reading more about Devs I liked. I'd rather just play the game and leave it up to whether I enjoy it in the long run or not.

Didn't even think of Brutal Legend!! It wasn't fantastic but as a heavy metal lover, this was a satirical gem. Having Lemmy and Ozzy lend voices as characters was a real treat and Jack Black did a decent job. The world could've been more expansive and easier to navigate IMHO. The MP was absolutely atrocious, I'll give it that.

Ghostbusters had so much potential. I think that hubbub came mostly from the actual actors and the surrounding controversy of another film coinciding with the events of the game. Haven't read up much on it since earrrllly last year.
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ASLANS R0AR
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Like Psycko said, the movie references were to illustrate a point, nothing more.

I liked Brutal Legend, because it is unique and I also love flipping between Ozzy and Priest as I drive my devil machine. Can't say much more though, otherwise we'd be under "other games."
Edited by ASLANS R0AR, May 23 2012, 08:23 PM.
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SgtMaj AJJ
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I boycott companies for their political or social stance, not the shifty, sometimes immoral, business practices. I would be living "off the land" if I did that.

I don't play codfish, however the iWard story is fascinating. Especially the release of the Bungie contract and what that tells us, or doesn't, about the new ip codenamed Destiny.
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Scruff 815
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I'm not trying to be a dick by directing you to the movie thread. I know conversations veer slightly off-topic; the "which cars or bikes have you owned" is currently about manual vs. automatic, but that's relevant to the topic and it's slowly and naturally gone that way. This is in a thread that was created when the original posts about it were deemed off-topic in a Call Of Duty thread. There were two posts that weren't at all about Activision and were just about movies. And I would like to join in the conversation about Shyamalan (and Sam Raimi), but I can't do that if people are discussing them in not even close to the right place.

The Acti / Bungie game appears to be a PC-based MMO, which is two areas that I have no interest in, so I can happily avoid that ;)
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SgtMaj AJJ
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Post contract analysis points to PC/Xbox"720" followed by PS3s successor.

You better be interested :P
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ASLANS R0AR
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Scruff 815
May 24 2012, 07:13 AM
I'm not trying to be a dick by directing you to the movie thread. I know conversations veer slightly off-topic; the "which cars or bikes have you owned" is currently about manual vs. automatic, but that's relevant to the topic and it's slowly and naturally gone that way. This is in a thread that was created when the original posts about it were deemed off-topic in a Call Of Duty thread. There were two posts that weren't at all about Activision and were just about movies. And I would like to join in the conversation about Shyamalan (and Sam Raimi), but I can't do that if people are discussing them in not even close to the right place.

The Acti / Bungie game appears to be a PC-based MMO, which is two areas that I have no interest in, so I can happily avoid that ;)
Scruff, I think I can understand where you're coming from, but I only see one post above that was completely unrelated to the Activision thread (debatable, depending on how one reads them I guess).

If there is a "number of unrelated posts allowed," then I'd like to know what it is so I can avoid going over that. One post allowed, then start a new thread, two posts, etc.?

I try hard to stay on topic, but like conversations, they naturally follow other directions at times. If the "rabbit trail" peeters out after 2-3 posts, why start a whole new thread? It would be a dead thread. Just trying to find the balance here. That said, I'll start a Shamalayan thread because I think it will prove interesting and generate discussion.

I appreciate that moderating a blog such as this is difficult and often involves judgment calls; sorry if I've made your job more difficult, I didn't mean for that. So, thanks for what you do my friend.
Edited by ASLANS R0AR, May 24 2012, 01:57 PM.
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Deadpool Psycko
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ASLANS R0AR
May 24 2012, 01:54 PM
Scruff 815
May 24 2012, 07:13 AM
I'm not trying to be a dick by directing you to the movie thread. I know conversations veer slightly off-topic; the "which cars or bikes have you owned" is currently about manual vs. automatic, but that's relevant to the topic and it's slowly and naturally gone that way. This is in a thread that was created when the original posts about it were deemed off-topic in a Call Of Duty thread. There were two posts that weren't at all about Activision and were just about movies. And I would like to join in the conversation about Shyamalan (and Sam Raimi), but I can't do that if people are discussing them in not even close to the right place.

The Acti / Bungie game appears to be a PC-based MMO, which is two areas that I have no interest in, so I can happily avoid that ;)
Scruff, I think I can understand where you're coming from, but I only see one post above that was completely unrelated to the Activision thread (debatable, depending on how one reads them I guess).

If there is a "number of unrelated posts allowed," then I'd like to know what it is so I can avoid going over that. One post allowed, then start a new thread, two posts, etc.?

I try hard to stay on topic, but like conversations, they naturally follow other directions at times. If the "rabbit trail" peeters out after 2-3 posts, why start a whole new thread? It would be a dead thread. Just trying to find the balance here. That said, I'll start a Shamalayan thread because I think it will prove interesting and generate discussion.

I appreciate that moderating a blog such as this is difficult and often involves judgment calls; sorry if I've made your job more difficult, I didn't mean for that. So, thanks for what you do my friend.
Aslan summed it up pretty well. Nobody's attempting to troll a topic off its topic but every now and then a segue or such pops in. I think if there were more daily traffic, it would surely be an issue but I don't see it as we're just posting LOL every post over and over.

I feel as long as a discussion doesn't completely veer off topic BUT remains a continual discussion (obviously, easily able to 180 back to the original convo), it shouldn't be an issue.

But again, as Aslan said, we're not purposefully trying to shift gears here.



OT: To summarize my whole shtick, it's like Michael Jackson. Even if he was found guilty of molestation, I wouldn't write him off as the King of Pop. Dude was a legend and an icon and you can't take that away from him. Same with actors and such. Their personal issues remain separate from their "work".
In conclusion, I won't shaft a game/company b/c of it's political notions unless it actually directly affects my ability to enjoy a game or not.
It's usually some issue involving some money I'll never see...so I don't care as much :coffee:
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Scruff 815
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Despite the temptation to create a new topic so I can stay on-topic about going off-topic, I'll put this here ;)

My comment was only intended as a friendly reminder of where such conversations should live; it was not a warning or a telling-off, nor were there any intentions of deleting posts or locking threads or bannings or any such malarkey.

I know that conversations veer off-topic, online and offline. There was a guy here once who insisted EVERYTHING had its own thread and that just got fucking ridiculous. Here we currently have conversations about manual vs. automatic cars in the "which cars have you owned" thread, and that's fine. Even in this thread, superficial conversations about the games Activision ditched, and Bungie's new IP, are fine. Anyone looking to talk about Activision-related things would likely look in here - people looking to talk about Shyamalan films are going to be looking in the movie thread and, noticing a lack of conversation, giving up and going on with their day rather than talking about Shyamalan films like they wanted to. If I'm not interested in a thread (and there are many in the Other Games forum) I just don't bother reading them, but if that thread turns out to actually be full of totally unrelated things I want to talk about then I'm going to have missed them and that's a shame.

I don't think we need a "[x] posts - create a new thread" rule or anything. I'm not trying to be a killjoy; my intention is to encourage conversation, not discourage it. To cut a long post short, all I consider when pointing someone in the direction of a new/existing thread is whether the off-topic post in question is likely to cause conversation. If it is, then it should go into an appropriate thread so that people know where it is and can discuss it, without derailing a pre-existing conversation. That is all. It's a common sense approach.

Incidentally the same applies for the Shoutbox. If you want people to discuss something, be it a picture or a video or a thing that happened in your day, don't put it in the Shoutbox - put it in the Shoutboxthread, or "things that make me giggle", or the new "oddities" thread that Deadpool made, etc.

Posted Image

On-topic: Nope, still don't care about the new Bungie thing. Yeah they made Halo which was awesome, but I feel no loyalty to them as a company. Also I don't do MMO's ;)
Edited by Scruff 815, May 24 2012, 06:48 PM.
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