Someone should file this under Modern Publisher Warfare 2. *snicker* As some of you know, former Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella have filed a lawsuit against Activision through O’Melveny & Myers. While lawsuits in the gaming business are nothing new and seldom interesting, I found it amusing that the law firm issued a press release to publicize the case. Here’s a quote on the lawsuit from attorney Robert Schwartz:
Activision has refused to honor the terms of its agreements and is intentionally flouting the fundamental public policy of this State (California) that employers must pay their employees what they have rightfully earned. Instead of thanking, lauding, or just plain paying Jason and Vince for giving Activision the most successful entertainment product ever offered to the public, last month Activision hired lawyers to conduct a pretextual ‘investigation’ into unstated and unsubstantiated charges of ‘insubordination’ and ‘breach of fiduciary duty,’ which then became the grounds for their termination on Monday, March 1st.
Honestly, I lost interest in the whole affair on Tuesday. I don’t think it’s as big a deal or as interesting as some people in the gaming press are making it out to be. That said, some of you appear to be interested in it so I thought I’d post the quote and a link to the press release.
Just to check myself, are you still interested in the Activision vs. West/Zampella feud?
Only if (Ricky)Bobby loses money.
Nope. Not really. I'm actually allergic to the word "lawsuit"… and I think everybody should be, too.
-M
definitely industry news-worthy, but I don't really care how it turns out personally.
I find it interesting a little bit, kinda, but it is blown out of proportion and over hyped. I did defend the public interest in this story a couple days ago, and I still would make the same arguments for why people find this story fascinating. But I’m just not one of the people who cares about it that much.
Yeah, it's news. How this all plays out could have an effect on the quality of the games coming out of Infinity Ward, not because of these two guys specifically, but because of the guys on the development side that may choose to follow them elsewhere should it come to it. Thus I think it's important and will keep following it. But I get that this might be over the heads of the average CoD gamer who's gonna buy the next CoD no matter who makes it.