At the beginning of the week we'd touched on Remedy Entertainment's relationship with the publisher for its game Alan Wake: Microsoft. According to the developer, there's quite a bit of leniency for them in deciding exactly how their game is presented to the media, which was surprising and pleasing to hear.

Developer Infinity Ward (Modern Warfare) is apparently in on this approach, too; designer Robert Bowling says it's "essential" creators take matters into their own hands:

“I don’t think any developer should not have control of how their game is presented or marketed or communicated,” he said, “and they should take control of that a lot, lot more. It is why I started my Twitter account in the first place. I have direct line to our audience and the press."

Bowling doesn't stop there though, going so far as to say one of the benefits of this directness is being able to "call bullshit on the really lame shit", giving an example with IW's publisher Activision:

“Recently we launched our new Infinity Ward website, and we were going to send a mass newsletter out to everybody. And it was suggested that we should send in the newsletter a note to pre-order the strategy guide for Modern Warfare 2. And I said no.

Yeah it would probably sell a few more strategy guides, but we don’t use our newsletter to market to our gamers. We will only e-mail our gamers if it is worth their while. So if a new trailer comes out, they might want to know and we’ll send them that. If they want the strategy guide, it is an awesome guide, and they’ll buy it because they want it. Not because we’re advertising it to them. So we draw lines.”

In another part to the interview, Bowling notes IW rejected Activision's proposal for what he calls a ridiculously high budget for the upcoming shooter, saying they "didn't need that" and "we would only put stuff in the game that is right for the game, and not because we can.”

Though drawing much ire from PC gamers for dropping dedicated server support on Modern Warfare 2, the developer has definitely retained some respect with us following these comments.