Robert Bowling - are you mad? What an insult to all those in the industry who labour day after day on marketing products for him to drop a comment under the assumption it's that easy. Does he also realise Publishers aren't one trick pony's and neither are retailers so he would have to do the marketing for all of Activisions slate - I would love to see him have to spend weeks and months working on lesser titles than MW2; maybe he would truly understand how business works outside of his little bubble. Stop making such stupid statements and belittling a lot of people who work really hard.

IW have lost total touch with their understanding of the "Gamer". The PC Community is about to turn its back on a franchise it created by whole heartedly supporting COD from day one. The 3 online petitions with over 250,000 signatures (lets not forget ONLY 36,000 signed the Anti-Blair petition) suggest IW don't know their gaming audience at all and to let them market their own product would be a monumental disaster and would see the demise of IW. Robert, stop getting dillusions of Grandeure, let the Publishers do what they do best.

"Not only do we know the game but we know the gamer."

Oh my did I laugh.

I think this chap must have won his job at IW via a Golden Ticket in a Wonka Bar. Shame he didn't get caught stealing Fizzy Lifting Drinks as well.

Pride comes before a fall.

And if MW2 sales are as low as they might be in the PC format, and maybe the 360 and PS3 as well being lower then IW is expecting, IW will fall hard.

Plus they will only have themselves to blame. As for Mr402 Bowling, me thinks he has illusions of grandeur, and will possibly soon find out he;'s not as important as he like to think he is.

Robert has a point and the sales facts speak for themselves.

John's points above are self defeating as he's stating if IW's marketing went through him it would be watered down as John needs to work on lesser titles needlessly diluting the impact, from IW's perspective, of their title.
Why would any developer want to see their impact watered down to save a few jobs that are a mixed bag of ouput at best?

Not everyone can create IW, this is business and I think we can all appreciate that a few select titles have outgrown a time-shared launch strategy that's been in place since the dawn of Anco.

They're smart, they'll make mistakes but they can also react quicker to the market than a publisher owned strategy would. I have a feeling they'll make a statement on the PC 'fiasco' in a few weeks and prove that going direct pays dividends to fans.

From past experience ( many times) when development studios start making decisions on marketing objectives and strategy it works against the very core of what you are ulimately trying to achieve.
If Robert Bowling thinks that because he has a Twitter account he's in touch with his audience for 140 characters a pop then he's pretty much just given the prime example of why marketing does marketing and devs should develop.
And apart from what camo pattern to attach to an Colt M4 assault rifle with double tap perk and Claymore for trashmouth 14 year old Johnny, aka gamertag 'Sniperdonkey' how much does Robert Bowling actually think he knows his gamer audience?
When you can hit an asset marketing calendar for bare basics lets talk, in the meantime keep hitting that keyboard and iron out the clipping bug on line 4537783-6

“It is why I started the Twitter account in the first place. I have direct line to our audience and the press..." And I guess that's why the IWnet change was kept so hush-hush all through the PC development. IW doesn't so much know the gamer as want to shoehorn all gamers into the same IW-controlled pigeonhole.

What a f***ng joke 402 and IW are making of themselves. "We know the gamers"?. Good PR?. Sure, if you count that as taking whatever the PC gamer community wants and giving them exactly the contrary.

Don't buy this game. Don't give money to Infinity Ward. They've totally lost it, and they're laughing in our faces.

Even recaptcha gives me "buyers reluc". BUYERS BEWARE!

Console gamers aren't the same as PC gamers, otherwise you wouldn't have a massive petition, or 3,000 comments bashing you on your IW blog about the latest screw up by your company.

IW knows PR? HAahahahahaha, tell that to ANY fan of ANY IW game and watch them laugh in your face. And I am not JUST referring to the latest failure for the PC in Modern Warfare 2, I mean ANY title. IW has historically been totally crap with communicating with even its FANS, much less the general populace.

omfg you think you know gamers?? You're making an idiot of yourself because you don't know us PC gamers at all. Lack of modding/custom maps and dedicated servers in mw2 prooves this. Me and my clan canceled our preorders, play your game yourself.

I couldn't read the words due to all the douche spraying out of his speak-hole was covering up the letters.

You can almost see the gleam in his eye and hear the soft giggle as he figured he'd put one over on everyone.

This reads like utter garbage, and anyone who actually believes what is written there certainly wrote it.

Gamasutra blog entry picking apart Infinity Ward's "strategy":

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JustinKranzl/20091021/3360/Infinity_Ward__Youre_Doing_It_Wrong.php

...when of the 250,000 people that signed the petition, a large majority were likely to have torrented the game anyway.

The biggest thing PC gamers are set to lose out on with the lack of dedicated servers is the ease of playing illegal copies of the game online. Plain and simple.

ActiBlizz and IW know they can make more money 'forcing' fewer people to buy legit copies on PC than having a million copies pirated. And the console sales will see them through the next 5 years of dev anyway, so really, the only people losing out are PC gamers who can't deal with change.

PC gamers need to man up and grow a pair.

@1: Sorry John, and just what do those hard-working marketting people work so very hard at? Deciding what bullshot material they are going to con the public with, to make them think a game will look like something it isn't? Offering those "incentives" for those few extra points on the review score? Remember IGN and PES do you?

You've obviously never been a developer having to deal with the pointless whims of some "genius" in marketting, whose sole skill is sending emails requesting "give us something to make the game look good and don't worry if it isn't like the final product, just make it look good".

Who then suddenly spouts the "hey, it's not our fault the game looks nothing like the fake CG marketting material we were given, that we demanded but are now denying any knowledge of" when the project turns out nothing like the bullshots. Because the devs spent so much time making fake images for them to sell the game with, they lost time to make the damned game as it should have been.

And it will be marketting who will be the people crying, "it has to release Q4, bodge the final level so we can get it out on time", or "don't worry about the bug, we'll patch it after it's released".

They'll be the reasons why the developers don't go home during crunch time, while the marketting dept shut down at 5:30 on Friday evenings to spend the weekend at home.

At least the developer knows how to develop and knows the limitations of the technology and the content of the game, which is about 99% more than Mr Marketting Person knows about it all. They also know the consequences of false selling a product with misleading info... KZ2 anyone?

wow, I want some of whatever he is snorting.

It's fair enough IW wanting to do their own marketing. They get royalities. Few other games do.

Most Game Developers are in a catch 22. Usually marketing is terrible. It's really breaks a developers heart to find out that the game he has been slogging his guts out making for a year or two is getting little or no exposure because of bad marketing.

You end up with box art and adverts that have worse art than the game itself, promises that can't be kept and flat our lies made on the back of the box, an amazing ability to take the worst possible screenshots and marketing spend based upon how popular the previous one was.

Game developers would love to do their own marketing. But they would get nothing in return for it. Before release everything is NDAed up the wazoo. They wouldn't get paid for it because publishers pay the 'experts'. And as I said before, most game developers don't get royalities.

It sounds a bit mercenary, but game developers are already working a lot of hours for budgets that are too small and can't afford to do extra for free.

After experiencing first-hand the marketing geniuses I have had to work with, and the ludicrous strategies that have come out of their coke-addled brains, I dont blame him for making more personal input. Pete Molyneux did it all the time, and his games never delivered. Even he didnt get the same amount of criticism levelled at him. Seems like their are alot of upset PC gamers here.

There's also the small issue of media planning and buying, which media agencies (such as Maxus, Mediacom, Mindshare, Mediaedge) specialise in.

IW are far too insignificant without Activision's wider portfolio, for most top 10 agencies to bother with, meaning that by going direct (without publisher support) IW would undoubtedly receive lower service levels, higher rates and generally poorer representation to magazines, TV broadcasters, websites... etc.

Sorry LeeC it seems you have got the wrong end of the stick. Developers like IW, and many others, will have a lot more control over the content created than you give them credit for and therefore what type of assets you moan about is not always driven by publishers/marketing. Publishers don't sit there and think 'oh how can I mislead consumers tomorrow'; they need them tomorrow and next day when they want them back to buy the next product. it's the same for Developers, publishers and retailers... get and grip and let go of what ever the issue is you are carrying.

you know the Gamer ?

What kind of drugs you take ?

What about the Pc community? She knows you? IW you can keep your game. I have canceled my game again

Thanks for helping me save money so I can get BF:BC2 instead!

http://blogs.battlefield.ea.com/battlefield_bad_company/archive/2009/10/26/dedicated-to-our-pc-players.aspx

I've had the fortune of working in both development and publishing. It's a shame how each 'side' tends to view the other.

In general I would say developers work hard to deliver a game and publishers work hard to sell it. I don't know why developers presume publishing is easy and vice versa - it seems to me a lot of energy is wasted in complaints about how the others aren't doing a proper job. Coding is a skill and marketing is a skill. If it didn't cost money and time I would seriously suggest job swaps for a week to see how the other side live.

@JS Because developers can see the results of the marketing once it's released. Or quite often, not see the results.

@ BC, let he who is without sin... etc.

Although I agree with a lot of the comments posted, I do believe MW2 sales will meet and indeed exceed what IW expect. It can't be stopped, being around the 'gamer' and the retail & online markets, I can see it happening very easily.