44 People Left Infinity Ward (57% Of IW)

[Kenny]

Killiana1a said:

shio said:

Everyone stopped counting, but this website didn't. 44 People left Infinity Ward amid broken promises, bad environment and stress caused by Activision. Almost 60% of Infinity Ward's Developers left, and rumors of IW's death is stronger than ever.

(3 of 10) 30% of animators/technical animators/mocap people are gone
(7 of 22) 32% of artists/concept artists are gone
(16 of 23) 69% of designers and scripters are gone
(11 of 15) 73% of engineers are gone
(5 of 5) 100% of writers are gone
(13 of 16) 82% of leads/directors from these departments combined are gone

 

In a recession, you can fill all those back up quite quickly. There is no shortage of unemployed technocrats.

Infinity Ward and Activision Blizzard will thrive due to COD: Black Ops selling at least 3 to 5 million, StarCraft 2 selling in the tens of millions, and Diablo 3 selling in the tens of millions. It is harder to gauge how WoW: Cataclysm will sell due to WoW entering it's 6th year.

As for the Infinity Ward founders, West and Zampella, who left and founded Respawn with EA as their publisher, I don't ever see them releasing a game that will come close to the magic of the COD series.

I don't think it's about whether or not they can find people to replace those who quit.  Different sets of people interact differently, and the old Infinity Ward seemed to have a good mix of staff that worked well together and managed to get their games right time and again.  When you lose more than half the company's staff and their experience, and are forced to replace them with outsiders whose chemistry together is completely unknown, there's little chance that they can hang onto the essence of the old team, for want of a better term to describe it.  Imagine if half the people at your office suddenly quit, and you were forced to learn how to get along with a whole new set of colleagues, or half of all your university professors/teachers quit, and you don't have a single course in the coming semester with anyone you know you understand.

That said, I agree that West and Zampella may never recapture the quality of the Call of Duty team, since they also ended up with less than half of the team.