Infinity Ward founders will “never be successful again,” says Kotick

Bobby Kotick is on a roll. We just reported how he “dissed” EA while talking to gaming mag Edge. Well, EA weren’t his only targets. He says fired founders of the super-successful studio Infinity Ward, Jason West and Vince Zampella will “have a really hard time ever being productive or successful ever again.”

After they formed a studio with EA, Kotick felt “betrayed.” Maybe that’s why he went on to say… stuff about EA. “It shook my belief in two specific people, who were my friends,” he said.

“The frustrating thing about that is, the stuff that these guys did, I never would have expected them to do. We’re a public company, we’ve got ethics obligations, and the things they did were… I would go to jail if I did them.

“You can’t use the company and the company’s assets for your own personal benefit, and you can’t use the leverage that you might have for personal benefit – you’re not allowed to do that! And so we didn’t have any choice.”

Kotick said he very well knew the consequences on the departure of West and Zampella. He said: “When we bought the company, they were 20 or 30 guys – these were guys that shared vacation homes together, they were all best friends, they were at each other’s weddings. We knew that when we had to fire Jason and Vince we were going to lose a lot of really talented people.

“That’s one of those really difficult decisions as the CEO of a company, where you step back and say, ‘No good is going to come of this. They’re going to leave and probably have a really hard time ever being productive or successful ever again, and we’re going to lose some talented people, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ And there wasn’t.”

He also revealed that he has revealed around 5,000 resumes for the empty IW positions.