”Not at all, there’s no buy in on that sort of stuff,” Bowling insists. ”We don’t care about sales numbers, we don’t care about competition, we don’t care about beating anyone. Our 100 per cent focus is making a game that we’re going to love to play, that we’re going to be proud of, and that we know that our fans are going to play. To us, we don’t care if there are three people playing it or 30 million people playing it. If there are three people having a great time then we’ve done our job correctly and we will be happy.”
Bowling also touched on the defection of over half the developer when co-founders Vince Zampella and Jason West left Activision in an acrimonious divorce with the publisher, forcing the company to merge Infinity Ward with fellow developer Sledgehammer Games.
”What’s really cool is, at Infinity Ward we have very strong design philosophies of this is what makes a Modern Warfare, and we have a very passionate vision of what we wanted Modern Warfare 3 to be, based on our feelings about MW2 and our fan feedback from COD4,” says Bowling. ”But then you have a team like Sledgehammer who comes in with a completely fresh perspective, a completely different outlook on what they expect from a Modern Warfare title and what they want to see from a fan perspective, because they didn’t work on the franchise previously. That allows a unique opportunity for us to execute on our vision, but also build on top of that in ways that we may never have before.”
Bowling added, ”There are inherently logistical challenges, especially early on doing something like that, (but) there was never a hard divide, like, ‘You take this, and we’ll take this, and we won’t speak to each other, we’ll just do our job.’ Once you made it clear that that’s not how things operate, that it is working as one team, playing off each other’s strengths and weaknesses, it really worked.”
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will be launched on multiple platforms on November 8, 2011. It’s more likely to sell three million than three - though it’s more likely to sell more, since Modern Warfare 2 sold 12.5M units on the Xbox 360 alone.