Bungie: IW plight didn't make us nervous
Also comments on announcement timing.
Bungie has told Eurogamer that the Infinity Ward situation was no cause for concern in signing with Activision.
Asked whether the very public sight of Activision sacking and then warring with former IW bosses made the Halo studio nervous, Bungie's Brian Jarrard said, "No, it doesn't, and I definitely don't want to comment or speculate.
"I think I probably know as much about it as you do - we all read the internet, it's hard not to follow it, but we're pretty comfortable," he told Eurogamer in an interview this afternoon.
"So, not that we would have concerns about being in any sort of situations down the road, but I feel like we're entering into this partnership on the right foot and have a really great mutual understanding of where each of our groups will plug in in the future."
We also asked whether it was a coincidence that Activision chose to announce this rather good news at the same time everyone's writing stories about people leaving Infinity Ward in droves.
"Yeah, I'm not going to lie, timing was certainly something we discussed, but like I mentioned the long form agreement was just signed this week so it was... and we have our [Halo: Reach] beta coming up and we didn't feel like it was fair to the Halo community and frankly to our friends at Microsoft and to our own team to have this news overshadowing a really momentous occasion for Reach. So we had a really short window to work with.
"I agree the landscape's a little bit volatile right now, the timing is definitely interesting, but I feel like it is what it is - we want to get this news out there."
For more on the deal, check out our full Bungie interview about the Activision deal.