It's not surprising that Blizzard is sticking up for their boss right now, given Blizzard's relation with it's fans (even holding it's own fairly successful cons), their word is a huge PR tool, and right now they are attached to Activision by chains. I very much doubt they could just break their contract and walk away with their profits and money making properties unscathed. Also, as the article points out, one doesn't kill the golden goose, and while Infinity Ward made a highly successful game, I don't think it's quite the constant cash infusion that something like WoW represents. Not to mention the simple fact that "Modern Warfare 2" probably woud have been substantially less profitable if Activision actually
paid out those bonuses, that would have raised the development costs considerably higher (the dev costs being how much people are being paid). Those bonuses they didn't want to pay were ungodly huge.
Also my personal conspiricy theory in regards to this is that we're looking at this from the wrong angle. Blizzard is probably scared right now, and with good reason. Their success and relations with guys like Kotick are based on World Of Warcraft. Next month we get an annoucement on the release date of "Old Republic Online" which barring a miracle of explosively bad game design is going to seriously cut into WoW's profit margins. WoW won't die, and it won't cease to make money entirely, but it's probaby not going to be the undisputed force that it once was. Blizzard has other hot properties, like the rest of "Starcraft 2", "Diablo 3", and "Project Titan" in the works, but all of that is going to take financing from Activision, and good will to complete and release.
Simply put, no matter what the level is, the workplace is the workplace. I think Blizzard realizes that it's going to need the good will of Bobby Kotick like never before when it's going to find itself in a less favorable position or money making, and wanting a lot of cash to develop (or keep developing) it's properties. Not to mention having some good will if one or more of them fail so they won't be kicked to the curb in a "what have you done for us lately?" fashion if they ever do become a temporary liability. It's happened to seemingly untouchable companies and developers before.
Simply put I think this is some high level brown nosing, which is why they are doing it out of the blue. The big boys at Blizzard are getting out the knee pads and puckering up. If "Old Republic" fails that will be good, but the way this looks they doubtlessly want to err on the side of caution.
That's what I think. That picture you see of Kotick there, well the reason why he's smiling is because of Mike Morhaime kneeling behind him demonstrating some gyro tongue action.
Please note that all attempts at humor aside, this actualy isn't intended to be an insulting theory. In the end if I'm right, it simply means Blizzard isn't stupid, and isn't so arrogant as to think it's always going to be so uber where Activision needs it so badly. While brown-nosing isn't the most glamourous thing in the world, it's usualy a safer path than being totally arrogant, and Blizzard DOES have a lot of employees and some fancy campuses with custom orc statues and everything. Things go badly with "Old Repubclic" as I said, and nobody wants to be told "your making less money so we want to downsize to increase our profits back up to projections. Go layoff half your work staff, we might let you rehire if these projects we like succeed, and those other ones YOU think will succeed but our panels are less sure about. Consider you'll be cutting those projects when deciding who will go".
