Infinity Ward Interview
Here at Tom's Games we're big fans of Infinity Ward and Call of Duty 4 so when the opportunity to interview Robert Bowling - Community Relations Manager at Infinity Ward and IAmFourZeroTwo blogger - at GDC presented itself we jumped at the chance.
We'll give you fair warning, we discuss the end of the game and the fates of certain characters so plot spoilers abound.
Tom's Games: You guys must be pleased with the performance of Call of Duty 4. It's won "Game of the Year" awards and enjoyed spectacular sales. Will Call of Duty 5 be the next project for Infinity Ward?
Robert Bowling: Right now we're just working on downloadable content for Call of Duty 4. Whatever comes next is up in the air.
Tom's Games: It did pretty well on PC but we saw some comments on your blog regarding the number of pirated copies out there. You guys actively track pirated copies?
Robert Bowling: Yeah, we're still extremely excited about the success of the game on PC. The game did phenomenal on PC and we still have a huge community playing on the PC. We're definitely not upset about that success. We do get upset when people pirate our games and it is something we track. There aren't any hard numbers that we can announce but it's something that's definitely disheartening when you put a lot of work and passion into a game and then realize that a large percentage of players are playing on cracked copies. But the PC game did tremendous sales so we're still very excited about the PC version.
Tom's Games: Do you see game piracy as the biggest threat to PC gaming?
Robert Bowling: Yeah by far. It's a big issue for any product when you lose a majority of your player base to stolen copies whether it be games or from a retail standpoint. If there're more cracked copies than legitimate ones that's a huge problem.
Screenshot from Call of Duty 4 from Infinity Ward and Activision
Tom's Games: Especially when you compare PCs and consoles. If your products are stolen on this box and not on that box then why even bother with this box over here. That's the issue that publishers face now.
What have you seen in terms of the number of players playing and the amount of time they're playing? Have you seen any specific trends with the multiplayer online?
Robert Bowling: Right now we're the number one most played game on Xbox Live worldwide. We don't have any official numbers because there's no one source to track Playstation Network statistics but we're also one of the number one games on PSN. So we're doing really well with online multiplayer and we've been number one on Xbox Live for two weeks running. I'm confident that we're going to stay number one for a while with the new maps and the feature patch we have coming out. That's really going to keep the game fresh.
We're hitting record numbers on both Xbox Live and Playstation network so much so that when we first launched on the Playstation 3 the servers had trouble. They'd never handled that much load at once and at any given time we had over 100,000 players playing on PS3. We had to do some optimization but they're fine now. They're completely stable. So that's the trend we've been seeing. We're also seeing more large groups so our peak hours are doubling in size of what they used to be in previous games. There's definitely a big trend of people getting online a lot more than they used to.
Tom's Games: Are you going to continue to add content for both the consoles and the PC?
Robert Bowling: Our main focus is to keep supporting the game as long as the players are supporting us. So as long as they're people playing we're going to keep updating it. Right now we're working on a DLC map pack for the PS3 and the 360 version which are going to include three maps right out of the gate. We're working on that now and that should be coming out around springtime although we don't' have an exact ETA. We're just working on getting them perfect right now.
On the PC side we released the mod tools and we're currently holding a PC community mapping contest where our users can create their own custom maps. On March 31 we're going to have them submit them to us. We haven't announced yet what we're going to do with them but we're looking at a lot of ideas. The easiest thing we could do is release them as a ranked PC map because right now if you play on a custom map it's unranked. So what we might do is take all the best maps and then release them as an official ranked map pack. Then there's a few other things we're looking at doing that we're not ready to announce yet.
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