Happy Independence Day Weekend to all our American listeners/readership.
This week's webcast features our monthly roundtable summarizing the
news in the CoD world. While everyone was out eating hotdogs and
watching fireworks, our team of community leaders got together to bring
you their views on what is going on in your favorite video game.
With us to share their wisdom are: Joe (Nabore) from Team Pandemic; Jim (Rudedog) from fpsadmin.com; Michael (Garetjax); U-z-i Kidding and PST*Joker from mycallofduty.net .
The topics for today's webcast include:
The future of IW.
IW re-ups with Activision:
From Fourzerotwo's blog:
"We’re excited to announce that in the recent months we have decided to
reup on our contract with Activision publishing. The recently
renegotiated deal may not seem like much of an impact from the outside
perspective, but it has laid the ground work and kick started our
future project, as well as the possibility of a unique new IP (ie. intellectual property) by
Infinity Ward, that we’ll have complete control over. We’re excited to
be working on our next project, but it’s going to be quite a while
before I can share any details on exactly what that project is."
About four months ago, Grant Colliertransitioned from Infinity Ward to Activision (special projects).
"As some of you may know, Grant handled a good amount
of the PR duties for the studio with myself handling the more community
/ individual focused efforts. With our Community focused efforts
expanding even further in the future, that PR-type position is no
longer required at IW, as we’ll be spearheading more tangible, personal
means of getting information out to our players...Essentially, this
means we plan on doing much less of the traditional PR that ends up
being a one way street"
Interestingly, in previous webcasts {PST}*Joker complained that all the
news that was forthcoming from IW was being put onto Fourzerotwo's
blog: IAMFOURZEROTWO.com
Clearly this is sanctioned by Activision/IW and clearly it is part of an overall strategy.
While in the past gaming PR used to be run out of corporate HQ's,
now...it's being brought to us by so called Community Reps. That is,
folks whose titles make it sound like they are advocates for the gaming
public but are really camouflaged corporate controlled mouthpieces.
The idea is that you can humanize data coming from
the corporate world by filtering through someone who to most gamers
looks and sounds like one of them.
