I’ve heard in the past that Infinity Ward has a less than cordial relationship with Activision. The shit finally hit the fan this morning, though, when two of IW’s top guys took a hike after meeting with the publisher.

At some point yesterday, Vince Zampella and Jason West met with Activision, after which they didn’t return to IW offices. Instead, a bunch of “bouncer-types” came around, presumably to ensure that neither exec would come back to work. By noon today both Zampella and West had updated their LinkedIn profiles to include Infinity Ward as previous experience.

Kotaku also dug up an SEC filing from yesterday that showed Activision had launched an investigation at IW for “insubordination” and “breaches of contract” regarding “two senior employees.” Activision has since confirmed both departures and announced the formation of a special division dedicated to churning out one Call of Duty game every year. Looks like the company will continue to bank on that franchise as a major source of revenue for as long as it can.

If you’re interested in what it feels like to get a temp ban on Xbox Live, go do a little suicide bombing in Modern Warfare 2. As Microsoft’s Stephen Toulouse tweets it: “While IW works on getting the MW2 glitch fixed, people we catch using it will recieve suspensions from LIVE. Play fair everyone.”

Now I understand the idea to an extent – bans because of game ruining – but banning players for something that game developers missed seems a little ridiculous. There are far easier ways to ruin games, like throwing them in your opponents favor, that won’t get you banned (I’m not talking about boosting here). And really, who hasn’t gotten a little tipsy/slaphappy/what-have-you and had a little fun.

I won’t say the glitch isn’t a game breaker. It is. But temp bans on a paid service for a glitch that almost everyone in the game is now aware of? One that really isn’t that hard to stop (how bout you don’t shoot the guy running around with a javy)? This kind of thing makes me want to go eat a glass apple.

I’ve only played through a few levels of the Modern Warfare 2 campaign, but it’s easily some of the best FPS campaigning I’ve enjoyed. Flashy guns, complicated situations, and characters with a whole bunch of issues always makes for an interesting story. Interesting enough, in fact, that Infinity Ward is thinking about giving one of those guys a solo gig. Yes, rumor has it that Ghost, the creeper with the skull mask, just might get his own game.

According to Craig Fairbrass, the voice-actor who played Ghost in MW2, things are looking like this: “I’m now voicing a guy called Ghost, who now just got a spin-off comic of his own and they’re talking about another little game to go with it.” Fans of the series probably got that little six-part comic, but does he mean the same thing by “little game?” Could Infinity Ward be looking at an iPhone game? It doesn’t seem likely that they would make a full-blown spinoff for a series that’s not typically character driven. Who does Ghost think he is, anyway, Master Chief? Puh-lease.

Source: That Video Game Blog

Alongside the release of Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 there’s a war of numbers breaking out. Analysts are trying to be the first to pin down a sales estimate, a number that has so far varied by several million units. At first it was Ben Schachter claiming 7 million for day one. Michael Pachter thinks Ben’s crazy, and estimates just 4 million copies for the first day. I’m inclined to trust Pachter, since even he puts things over the top at times.

Whatever the real number, it has a lot of zeroes, and that’s got to make Activision pretty happy. Most analysts still think the 12 million unit estimate for the quarter through December is conservative. That puts total sales by year end somewhere around $700 million, which is just obscene. By comparison, Halo 3 just made it through 8 million units in its first 3 months. As a throwback, Joystiq also mentioned that Street Fighter II, which literally everyone I knew owned, sold 6.3 million units total worldwide.

Hopefully the end of the quarter will bring some hard and fast numbers for us. Until then, go throw some knives at some people. It’s insanely fun.

Now that Modern Warfare 2 is less than a week away, it seems the world is obsessing over any aspect of the game it can find. We’ve had offensive ads and offensive content, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping the masses of Call of Duty fans from flocking to stores to pre-order. Gamestop told Game Hunters that MW2 is now the most pre-ordered game it has ever sold.

Activision has really pulled out the stops to get people interested in the game. Sure Modern Warfare was great, but it’s more than just the game. Walmart, for example, will be selling copies of the game that have been autographed by the dev team to the first 20 people at each of its stores. Details like that really get the nerdy blood flowing, almost as much as the prospect of knife throw kills. If I had the chance at an autographed copy of the game if it meant cutting out the knife throw, you can bet I’d stick with the knife throw.