Infinity Ward Lead Developers Axed Unexpectedly

RogueyWon writes "Kotaku is reporting that Infinity Ward, the development studio behind Modern Warfare 2, has been at the center of strange events recently. Jason West and Vince Zampella, two lead developers, have been fired by parent company Activision for 'breaches of contract and insubordination.' Speculation is rife as to the reasons behind this; following Modern Warfare 2's spectacular sales figures, it seems unlikely that the studio's performance could be to blame."

Comments

Why is this news?

[pvera]

Are these the only two programmers in this field that lost their jobs today? Not really.

Are these two responsible for writing all the code in the game? Not really, it takes hundreds of people to put out even a mediocre game. There are more QA people in just one game than the total number of programmers I have worked with for the past 10 years.

Plus lets be realistic here, they are lead developers, which means they probably spent most of their days riding the damn phones. I am a lead programmer and there are days that pass without me being able to write one damn line of code, and my projects are tiny in comparison to a retail video game.

By all of the noise published so far about this, one would believe that these two are being canned due to nefarious purposes. Maybe they kept forgetting to use the new TPS cover sheets. Or they said the wrong thing to the wrong exec. If you think that you are "essential" to the company, figure out if the company has key man insurance on you. If they don't, then you probably aren't.