Modern Warfare 2 developer Infinity Ward has been haemorrhaging staff for the last two months, but according to publisher Activision, things are still going very well for the developer.

Things don't seem to be going as well as Activision asserts they are though...

While Activision’s decision for fire two of the developer’s most senior staff has led to the company gradually seeing more and more staff involved in the development of the record breaking most recent addition to the Call of Duty have been leaving the company. Now that the first two to have left Infinity Ward have started up their own developer (the appropriately named Respawn Studios), it seems that the rate at which staff are leaving Infinity Ward has been kicked up a notch.

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Infinity Ward is continuing to haemorrhage staff today, with word coming out that another three of the staff that had worked on the record breaking Modern Warfare 2 have decided to leave.

Activision’s decision to fire Infinity Ward’s co-founders, Vince Zampella and Jason West, is likely looking like something of a misstep, with the hit developer now having lost fully seven members of staff, including some who seem to have been fairly integral when it comes to the development of Modern Warfare 2. Word comes from IGN of the news that Infinity Ward has now lost senior animator Bruce Ferriz, programmer Jon Shiring and Modern Warfare 2’s lead designer, Mackey McCandlish.

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It seems that Ubisoft’s heavy-handed approach to digital rights management (DRM to you and I) has come under heavier fire than the publisher had initially expected, with the anti-piracy servers for two of the company’s latest titles being hacked.

No Assassin's Creed 2 on days when hackers get unruly...

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, it emerged last week that Ubisoft’s upcoming Assassin’s Creed 2 for PC (as well as the submarine chasing Silent Hunter 5) would require users to have a connection not only when they initially register the game, nor when they launch it, but throughout their play of the titles. While this might not seem like too much of a headache, the fact that the game boots players if they lose their internet connection has raised hackles.

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It seems that those of us anxiously awaiting the release of James Cameron’s record-breaking Avatar on Blu-Ray in 3D will have to wait a little longer, with Cameron revealing that the release is scheduled for November.

Anyone looking forward to Avatar in 3D at home is going to have to wait...

TechRadar is reporting that Cameron revealed the news in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. The standard DVD release of Avatar is scheduled for April, while those looking to watch the 3D version in the comfort of their own homes are going to have to sit on their hands for seven months while they wait for the Blu-Ray release.

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It seems that YouTube’s traffic numbers for music videos might not be quite as accurate as many had hoped, with Warner Music Group pointing to some fairly questionable numbers.

YouTube does have its own music service...

Word comes via Cnet that Warner Music saw a massive spike in the number of unique visitors to its various different YouTube videos between over the course of December and January, with reports indicating that it had managed to more than double its traffic, seeing views around the 47 million mark in a month. Still, all might not be as well as it seems from that description…

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Electronic Arts seems to be making something of a move away from the PC as a games platform, with the most recent casualty being Dead Space, which it seems won’t be seeing a PC release.

Oh dear, he seems to have taken a bit of a tumble...

The news that we won’t be seeing a version of the sequel to last year’s fairly popular survival horror title on the PC comes as part of Electronic Arts’ recently released schedule for the last quarter of 2011, when we can expect to see the console version make an appearance. Instead, anyone who played Dead Space on the PC and wants to follow into the sequel will have to make a decision on whether they want to play it on either Microsoft’s Xbox 360 or Sony’s PlayStation 3.

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It seems that the running spat between Amazon and publisher Macmillan has come to something of a close, with Amazon announcing that it will allow the books to be sold for the price Macmillan had requested.

When I was your age, Pluto was a planet and we used to argue about the prices of REAL books...

The issue arose when Macmillan attempted to price digital versions of its books at $15, which is fully 150% of the usual amount for ebooks available through Amazon’s Kindle Store. Macmillan weighed in with the fairly heavy threat that, unless Amazon allowed the heftier pricing, it would not be distributing new books to Amazon on release.

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It seems that the trend towards the adoption of ebook readers has some book publishers worried over the possibility that their content will see illegal piracy on the rise.

Word comes via TorrentFreak that, despite the general lack of bestselling authors in the list of the top 25 most pirated books last year, many publishers seem to fear the ease with which their content might be distributed illegally for the ebook reader-enabled population. Indeed, as a result of their generally small size once digitised, book publishers could potentially have more to fear from piracy than publishers of more data-heavy media.

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Amazon has slowly been rolling out Kindle functionality to a range of devices that have nothing to do with its own Kindle hardware except that, with the addition of a dedicated app, they’re capable of being ebook readers.

Last month, Amazon released a Kindle app for Apple’s iPhone and a standalone Kindle desktop app for those of us who’d like to read ebooks from the comfort of our desks. It’s certainly an interesting idea, and one that ensures that Amazon’s customers are more open to the idea of picking up a piece of its own Kindle branded hardware, having already interacted with the hardware.

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It seems that piracy lawsuits are a gate that swings both ways with Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal now facing some fairly hefty bills to remunerate artists whose content, it seems, they’ve pirated.

Usually we tend not to see what happens on the far side of the table, with most of the media attention surrounding record labels and piracy centred quite firmly on the poor souls dragged into court by apparently merciless megapulishers, but now we’re told that record labels are facing the fairly substantial sum of $6 billion in damages to be paid to artists they’re found guilty of pirating roughly 300,000 tracks from.

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Gaming monolith Electronic Arts has said that it is to wind down its major releases, moving more towards mobile and “online” games, though it doesn’t detail exactly what we can expect from those.

It certainly seems very much like the end of an era, with EA very much the only megapublisher in the videogame industry for a long time. Recent economic turbulence has led to a situation that’s more than a little difficult for the company though, and it’s been shedding staff from some fairly core studios lately, which had led to speculation that things might be going worse than imagined.

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