The studio that started the Call of Duty phenomenon fell to pieces earlier this year with the firing of its co-founders and the following mass exodus of pissed off Infinity Ward employees. With enough money, you can recover from that.


And when you're Activision Blizzard, you can put Infinity Ward back together again. You can get over it. And Activision's owner claims it has, according to the Financial Times. "We have reconstructed Infinity Ward," said chairman and CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy of Vivendi, the majority owner of the mega-publisher. "We have been very happy with the way we have been able to reconstruct it."


Not that Vivendi and ActiBlizz need them! Lévy boasts that Black Ops developer Treyarch has outperformed the old Infinity Ward with its latest game. And they have Sledgehammer!

Activision did promise "Ultimately, Infinity Ward will rise from the ashes" not long after aggressively hiring new talent for the embattled studio. We're sure they'll be wrapping up Modern Warfare 3 any day now.

Vivendi sees continued success for COD franchise [FT]