Is Activision Evil (or just stupid)?

I can't help but hate to label corporations as evil. That business is such a cruel thing and that so many of my fellow university students are happily leaping into the gears of the machine is always something I struggle to cope with. Who knew that we needed so many people in suits making decisions that affected nearly everyone (I'm talking about consumers).

Of course, despite this tendency to give business the benefit of the doubt, Activision seems to try everything at their disposal to prove me wrong and show the lengths to which an organization with shareholders and a rising stock price can do to fuck all of that up. Here comes word from developer Infinity Ward and how Activision mishandled them and their creativity.

CVG reports (or is it takes from Playstation Official Magazine?):Speaking in an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine, Infinity Ward boss Vince Zampella revealed that the developer has wanted to create a modern combat game - and work on consoles - for years, but Activision's held them back.

"With Call of Duty 2, we were dead set against it being World War 2," Zampella told OPM, "but Activision really wanted it, the compromise sort of being that we'd get some dev kits for consoles in exchange for doing a World War 2 game.

"We always wanted to be on consoles and Activision saw us as more of a PC developer," he said. "And something I'll add to that, Activision also did not want Modern Warfare. They thought working on a modern game was risky and [thought], 'oh my god you can't do that, it's crazy!' They were doing market research to show us we were wrong the whole time," he said.

"We had to fight for everything," chimed in CoD project lead, Jason West. "They wanted it to be World War 2. Again."

Hindsight is, of course, 20:20 but does that mean that we shouldn't still shake our heads with as much mocking disappointment we can muster? Why would you want to sell gamers ANOTHER WWII game? How could that possibly have been considered a smart business move? As much as games try to imitate their big brothers in Hollywood, developers and publishers have yet to figure out the big secret: you have to let your genres cool enough, or even die.

Do you ever wonder why we no longer have Westerns flooding the movie theaters? Because audiences grew tired of them and they were lost on the newer youthful movie goers. Do young people today have any reverence for the wild west when we are without a frontier? More specifically, what is the current frontier? Space. Of course our movies are going to concern themselves with what is much more prominent in our collective consciousness.

Why didn't Activision realize this? CoD 4: Modern Warfare was only TWO years ago, very much in the current console generation. After the glut of World War II games during the era of the Playstation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube, how could you think that such a thing would transfer over to the NEW generation?

Let me clarify. I'm not really mad. As I said, I just wish companies in the video game industry would stop making me look like such a complete horse's ass when I don't rage and loathe the very fiber of their being like all of my compatriots do.