Well Infinity Ward.....

Today is a big day for Infinity Ward. Their debut map pack for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has been released and well....lets just say it hasn't been pretty so far. 1200MSP price point for three new maps and two that are remakes of two Modern Warfare maps is pretty ridiculous. I heard from some friends that downloading it this morning was a chore and now from what I gather, the maps won't even render for you to play on. High price for something that doesn't work....I don't know if this is a hiccup on Microsoft's end or if IW is getting sloppy. It makes me wonder what's really going on over there at IW. I can only assume it has something to do with the Activision fiasco.

I'm going to assume that you all haven't been keeping up with Infinity Ward's news so here's the information before the opinion:

Sometime March 1st, 2010 according to sources close to IW, a "bunch of bouncer-types" just showed up outside IW offices without reason and when confronted by IW staff, they virtually said nothing. It turns out that earlier that day Vince Zampella and Jason West; two bigwigs down at IW had met with their good friends Activision and hadn't been seen since. Things were supposedly tense between the two companies for a while.

According to an SEC filing earlier that morning, Activision claimed "breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at IW." In fact, later that day a shot surfaced of Jason West's Facebook page to say "Jason West is drinking. Also no longer employed."

- Source for information: G4TV.com's The Feed Blog.

Alright, now that you know the facts, here comes the good stuff. What the Hell is going on? Why would Activision all of a sudden practically punch IW in the balls when they had just released the highest selling piece of entertainment in the U.S. ever? The only reason I can even comprehend what could make them do that other than money. Infinity Ward is entitled to some pretty substantial royalties from the sales of the game. Knocking out the top two of IW studios would sure as Hell save Activision some money....not like they need to. But they still did put two of their own as top dogs to replace West and Zampella so something tells me this was a long time coming.

At any rate, the two shafted Studio heads still have stake in the MW2 magic and thusly are probably the reason that the Map Pack is having some issues...... not really. Infinity Ward wouldn't be the people trying to sabotage a perfectly good game's progress *cough* ACTIVISION *cough cough* for selfish gain. At any rate there's something deeper running here that we don't know about yet but I hope this gets resolved and quickly; in situations like this the gamers are the ones who end up with the short end of the stick. And anyone will tell you when gamers get pissy, the companies don't do so well and it'll cycle like that for a while until someone working there get's their head out of their ass.

Infinity Ward is an amazing company with some very talented people working there producing some of the best games my generation has seen. I've bought every COD they put out day one and DLC (downloadable content) to boot; but in this current state where Activision is pulling the strings, I don't know if I could continue doing that.

-Armand