@Feanor: The interview is quite good. While I agree that I generally don't trust Kotaku, this is an interview with the man many of us seem to hate, so I think it's worth reading.
@ch13696: I can't remember anyone hating on Activision this much since the MW2 incident. If you read the interview he did with Kotaku, he seems like a decent human being who is a shrewd businessman, which can occasionally overlap each other.
@ch13696: While I agree that CEO's make far too much money in corporate america, Kotick's the CEO. That's what he does. Of course he makes more money that the average developer.
Let's also not forget that Ubisoft has the always-on DRM, and EA has been swallowing up smaller studios for years, not to mention the fact that they've got DRM similiar to Ubisoft in C&C 4.
I'm not saying we should all love Kotick and Activision, I'm saying we should let the facts unfold and get the whole story before we declare Activision to be evil.
@Semition: You're right, they haven't payed royalties to the team, but you have to remember, the average salary of an IW employee now is $91,000. That's not even counting when CoD4 was such a huge success.
So, it seems amongst the hardcore gaming community, Activision has been a great source of ire and anger. Now, don't call me an Activision fanboy or defender, I haven't bought an Activision game in ages. Now, to my main point. (which will probably make some of you angry) I don't think Activision has gotten a fair deal from us. The IW situation was handled very poorly, I agree, but the truth is that none of us TRULY know what was happening behind closed doors, so I don't think it's fair to prop up Kotick and his company as agents of Satan. Let's not forget, what was so great about MW2 in the first place? The story made no sense whatsoever, the multiplayer has tons of hackers that IW has yet to patch, and they cut out dedicated servers for the PC version. We all make the IW team out to be the innocent artist being crushed by "the man" but we have to remember, West/Zampella were being paid millions of dollars in salary to work on MW2. Now, I agree that royalties should be paid, but we have to remember that these guys are millionaires, they're not exactly starving artists. I think we should wait until we have the facts all sorted before we make judgements, and, let's be honest, Activision is a business. They have a responsibility to their stockholders to maximize profits. If that means pumping out new CoD or Guitar Hero games every year, than that's how it'll work. We don't have to buy them.
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