People are making mountains out of mole hills , would you let a part of your workforce sit idle during the downtime between game completion and the next one in what is a cyclical industry, or do you put those people onto other work that should help alleviate crunch, now until Activision say they are being absorbed into those COD studios or closed down or they get the call of duties are resumed ( pun intended) people may have a point, but only the future will tell and even then there may be other circumstances at play.

EA is no better or worse than any AAA publisher at this point. They're all as equally bad. EA is singled out for being one of the trendsetters of being shitty over a decade ago. Now they are all on equal footing of awfulness.

Everytime people on vgc and outside acts like companies are morons and they would run them much better I just sigh, because in the end it just as you put. Whatever these people say is best ends up not being the success they think it would, but they rather think companies are evil and stupid instead of looking for highest profit.

Honestly I don't care for developers being ""forced"" to work in a specific IP as long their working contracts and reasonable and respected then that's fine, it's not like they were hired to choose what to develop, they were hired to work in whatever the company seems fit

If a studio only wants to release one game let it be. For instance, Game Freak has been releasing mostly Pokemon for like 30 years and nobody really complain 

I don't like CoD and don't plan to ever play a new CoD in my life, but I guess this studio is not my posession, they have freedom to publish whatever they want if it's not for me, I will just keep ignoring it 

Estimates suggest Crash 4 sold just under 1m in its first month and would have sold even more throughout fall if it was on the new platforms. Longterm I'm sure it'll be a multi million seller whilst having a budget the fraction of a traditional AAA. But Activision are clearly only looking for cash cows and probably pumped so much money into its marketing that they artificially inflated its budget to 2/3x what it needed to be.

Maybe they'll continue with Crash/Spyro but outsource the work and be comfortable with 2-3m sellers. Otherwise I do hope they sell the IPs to another publisher who value having a diversified portfolio which tackles different age markets.

Pretty much. All of us in our work basically do what our employer asks for, and if we are unhappy we look for a better place.