Award winning game developer Infinity Ward has continues to lose staff, with reports indicating that another five members of staff have fled the company, bringing the total up to eighteen resignations/sackings in the last two months.

Things are looking pretty grim for Infinity Ward...

For the moment, there’s been relatively little public discussion, but it seems that Infinity Ward’s senior designers, Mohammad Alavi, Chad Grenier and Brent McLeod have left the company, following fifteen other resignations since publisher Activision forces out the company’s president and CEO, Vice Zampella and Jason West respectively. According to gaming blog Kotaku, the developer has also lost programmer Chris Lambert and designer Jason McCord this week.

As yet there’s no word on just where the staff who have been leaving Infinity Ward have ended up, but rumour has it that West and Zampella’s new development studio, the appropriately named Respawn Entertainment, has been looking for staff, and who better to take on in that case than developers with whom you’ve already worked to produce one of the bestselling games of all time?

It’s also curious to see that this news comes the week after Activision declared that things were ticking along nicely at Activision and that it didn’t expect any difficulty to arise in the development of follow up titles to Infinity Ward’s smash hit, the phenomenally successful Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Indeed, the word from Activision seemed to be that the shakeup (which appears to be ongoing) at Infinity Ward would allow newer developers to come to the fore, specifically those who might not have had a chance to make an impression with the staff who’ve left present.

Of course, the legal fight between Zampella, West and Activision over unpaid royalties and various questionable uses of Activision’s company jet is still brewing.