they have **** all to do with the next game.
THe next COD game is published by activision and made by treyarch. IW don't even come into it. IW are all but dead anyway.
They might not be the developer of CALL OF DUTY: Black Ops, but they are no doubt still the developer for the next CALL OF DUTY game to be released in 2011, to fit Kotick's yearly sale of a game series.
It doesn't matter whether half the original Infinity Ward staff left, if they are developer, then they will be hiring and have plenty of talented people lined up to work on the game. That's in general how the whole Entertainment industry (games, tv, films) works.
Kotick comes across to me as somebody who is very outspoken about his views about what he wants to do. Thankfully though there are people behind the scenes who don't let his ideas see fruition because they know they won't work.
As I said before, I highly expect Black Ops to have some limiting features introduced, specifically like many Publishers have started doing to stop pre-owned sales, for example, Battlefield BC2 with the VIP code.
Introducing a subscription to pay COD will only be played by the most hardcore of players, sure many of them will already pay £10 every couple of months for a new pack, but they would massively risk alienating the casual player, which still makes up a great deal of the market and likely to cause a huge backlash which will only be reported negatively against Activision when it gets released.
