There is a good reason Firefly went under the radar. Despite a few moments of brilliance it was boring. Even Joss Whedon admits the scripts were meandering and directionless. While it had a fine cast and a great premise there was never a sense of direction to the show and thus people stopped watching it, I know I did and I bloody love Joss. It probably would have stayed on the air if DVD sales were counted as they are now but I prefer it the way it was. A good series with a ball-bouncingly good movie.

LOL. MW2 could of been released in a jewel case, no book and a burned DVD/Blu-Ray, had a 12 second shot on hand camera commercial and it would of still sold like it has. People were frothing at the mouth to get it the second it was released.

And WHY were people "frothing at the mouth" and the like? Guess what? It has to do with the things like the ad campaign, the previews that pretty much kept telling us we were re-enacting The Rock, etc. And guess who was responsible for that? Not Infinity Ward :p

LOL How about just having the "Call of Duty" name stamped upon it? I bet they could release "Call of Duty: Granada" and it would sell millions with nothing more than a little announcement on their site.

An exaggeration (I'm sure), but guess who maintains that fancy website?
And who funds the development of these games?
Publishers are just as important to non-indie games as the devs.

No, I did precise calculations and got millions as an answer, of course it is a exaggeration. But it is true though.
And Devs are just as important to Publishers and vice versa. The Developers deserve the majority of the credit anyways, they are the ones doing the actual work. And Infinity Ward has made Activision some major money, and to Console Games MW2 IS the second coming of Jesus, just look at the sales and the ongoing sales. Activision should of sucked it up and paid them the money, now they probably lost over a quarter or more of their revenue in the future.

Then you have the counter-argument: Yeah, IW make lots of money for Activision. But they create a hostile working environment, make the heads of Activision look worse (everyone blames Kotick for the no dedicated servers thing, not IW), and are apparently going to continue to ask for money regardless of a contract.
Let's say you have a hen that lays golden eggs. You can sell each egg for 500 dollars. But you need to pay 450 dollars in vet bills every day AND need to provide special housing so that the roosters don't mate with it. Is it really worth the hassle?
Same thing here. Activision likely felt that the heads of IW weren't worth the hassle, so they wanted to get rid of them. But they DID keep the people who actually "made" the game.
And on the topic of who does the "actual work", is extensive work on the MP5's magazine model more or less work than maintaining the message board? Or writing the storyboards for the commercials? Or writing the press releases?

IW heads got greedy and Activision did the right thing. The world would be better if IW didn't exist in my opinion anyway. I'm glad those guys got 'blacklisted' and embarrassed, they were total dicks.

But didn't IW countersue in the first place? This is confusing.
Still, I need some popcorn.

My understanding is that the general chain of events so far was Activision fired West and Zampella, who then sued Activision, then Activision followed up with this countersuit. My take on this response is that Activision would rather not duke the thing out publicly in court, so this countersuit is legal posturing in the hope that it will give them leverage for a more favorable out-of-court settlement. Now I'll just have to wait and see if further events prove me right or wrong on this. Either way, I agree that popcorn is definitely called for.