LATEST CHATTY HEADER

http://pc.ign.com/articles/104/1042836p1.html

Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith, in the quarterly earnings call dated November 5, 2009, on the outrage from Modern Warfare 2 PC not having dedicated servers:

"We're of course watching this very carefully and paying attention to it. But we're not overly concerned about it. We think one of the problems with our PC SKUs on this title in the past is that it has not been as friendly a consumer experience in terms of matchmaking and online play as the consoles have allowed it to be. Our solution here improves that consumer experience overall by a significant margin. So we think the benefits that we'll see are going to far outweigh any negatives that seem to be surfacing."

It made sense from a money perspective back then, but it opened the door for EA to market Bad Company 2 PC against Modern Warfare 2 PC on feature merits (even though BC2 didn't have truly open dedicated servers; IIRC only rented servers can be ranked). And even though the angry segment of gamers was too small to matter in a market share perspective (and even though a lot of them bought MW2 PC anyway), it still left a negative mark on the reputations of Activision and Infinity Ward in the PC multiplayer FPS community, on which EA and Valve capitalized.

I wish you well on your future endeavors, Mike.