Killing the Goose

Did Activision expect some measure of loyalty from IW, above and beyond that which is strictly mandated by their contracts? If so, they are naive beyond measure. Did they think that the studio which created 2009's most wildly successful entertainment product wouldn't want a bigger share not only of the profits, but also of creative control of the franchise which they had created?

Did Activision executives dream, for even one second, that if they weren't willing to fight to keep IW happy, their competitors wouldn't step into the breach with persuasive offers?

Or - and herein lies perhaps a more likely explanation, albeit a more worrying one - did Activision simply decide that it owns the key IP involved with Modern Warfare 2, including both the name of the game itself and the Infinity Ward name, and that therefore pesky developers clamouring for a larger slice of the enormous pie they'd just baked were surplus to requirements?

Did they calculate that losing Infinity Ward's staff was an acceptable risk, since the franchise could always be handed off to other developers - who would effectively be working for hire, rather than working on self-created IP, and thus would be far easier to manage?

So let's update our poultry-based parable for this modern age. Activision is not the farmer who wrung the neck of the golden goose - rather, it is the farmer who banged the goose up in a cage with all of the other battery geese and told it to lay golden eggs to a strict schedule, or else. It comes as no surprise to anyone that the goose promptly took ill and stopped laying.

In so far as publishers are to continue as powerhouses of this industry, with the budgets to attract or acquire top developers and fund the creation of expensive blockbusters, there are two competing philosophies at work here.

One of them states that since the publisher has the money and the IP, the talent is barely relevant except as a PR exercise. It's bad PR to lose your key creative staff, as the IW debacle demonstrates, but, this school of thought believes, you can always recruit more developers, and once the franchise is established any moderately talented team can keep turning out profitable sequels.

That's the school of thought which Activision is apparently embracing at the moment. Interestingly, it's also a school of thought which was largely embraced by Electronic Arts during Larry Probst's tenure as CEO - and which the publisher has since abandoned in favour of the second approach.

This approach says that one of the publisher's key jobs, perhaps as important as finance or marketing, is to keep the talent happy - to ensure that top developers and their key staff are satisfied, motivated and well-rewarded, made to feel that their relationship with the publisher is a partnership rather than that of an indentured servant and his master.

Infinity Ward's gradual reforming under EA's wing as Respawn grants a unique opportunity for those two concepts to go head to head. In the coming years, we will inevitably see a battle for sales and critical acclaim between a title from EA / Respawn, and an Activision title bearing the Modern Warfare brand. The owners of the IP will go head to head with the talent that created that IP.

Although the circumstances were very different, the last notable instance of that came when British studio Sports Interactive launched Football Manager (for SEGA), competing directly against a new title using their old, well-loved IP, Championship Manager, which had been handed by former publisher Eidos to a newly formed studio following their split with SI. History relates the rest - things did not go well for Eidos, while Sports Interactive's new IP quickly regained the full prominence which its old IP had enjoyed.

Activision will fervently hope that this does not prove to be a blueprint for future comparisons between its handling of the Modern Warfare franchise and EA's new IP from Respawn.

The rest of the industry, meanwhile, will look on with bated breath. What started out as an entertaining spat between a publisher and its star developer could, in time, be a landmark incident in defining the evolving relationships between publishers and the creative teams on which they rely for their hits.