The Infinity Ward situation has not been pretty and there's been a lot of negativity thrown Activision's way in the wake of the firings and resignations at the Call of Duty studio. In fact, independent developer Insomniac called the Infinity Ward news "horrifying." Although Activision has seen a ton of bad press, CEO Bobby Kotick recently insisted, "We remain the top destination for development talent in the video game industry."
Kotick's claim was quickly backed up when Halo developer Bungie signed a massive 10-year deal with Activision. Speaking with IndustryGamers about a newly launched indie games competition, Laird Malamed, Senior Vice President of Development, said that Activision has always been a big supporter of the development community, and he doesn't see the Infinity Ward controversy changing that.
"I know those questions [about repairing our image with developers] are on people’s minds, but we do a number of things to foster the independent game community that we haven’t published as much. I see this [indie games contest] more as a continuity of things we’ve already been doing. Being the number one third-party publisher, we sort of have a target on our back in a new regard, and sometimes that's how people see it when you are big and successful," he said.
Malamed continued by noting that Activision has a good track record and continues to show developers respect. "I think that our record overall speaks for itself. We’ve had an independent game development culture since Raven, our first external studio that came on board; they joined in 1997 and we had a 10-year anniversary with them back in 2007. Bobby Kotick talked about how the model came out of that acquisition when working with Raven, and letting people run their own shops. We have a dozen or so developers operate on that principle," he remarked. "On the same token, I look at the deal we just did with Bungie in Seattle, and that to me is evidence that we are doing stuff right. They feel comfortable in trusting us to produce their products with them. That’s a pretty big catch; that’s a triple-A team, and that’s really our goal to have triple-A teams."
