So paying $60 for a 6 hour campaign is good and less multiplayer features from the year before and can be shutdown when the company feels like it is good? That's nuts! COD 1 and it's expansion is so great is because sp is long and challenging and mp is great because people can still play it when IW does not support it anymore. Modding has brought COD 1 different multiplayer maps, different gameplay mods, weapon adjustments, an even harder sp campaign, graphical changes for sp,etc. It's cheap now but plenty still play it.
COD MW2 has less players on a server, smaller maps, no lean, no mod support, no dedicated servers to keep mp alive. MP will probably be worthless when BO comes out or a few months after. The game will probably still be high priced just like COD 4 and WaW. It's a crappy deal and other games offer much better.

I honestly haven't read all the replies so I'll just dive in here: you know that most servers you play online on ARE being paid by someone right?
And looking at the prices noted in the article they aren't even inflated or crap: that's the normal medium price for a FPS gameserver per slot so I don't really get why all the rage.

$60 for a 6 hour campaign: I am not huge on that, but that is the case for a lot of games. I myself did not feel MW2 to be worth 60 bucks, but I am clearly not indicative of most of the world. That being said, I suspect most of them bought it for the multiplayer
Less multiplayer features from the previous year: Did they drop anything other than dedicated servers? Seemed like it had a LOT more fun perks. And most people didn't seem to care about that, outside of the "sheeple" hate groups :p. Not my cup of tea, but whatever. And either way, Activision has learned from that mistake.
Can be shut down whenever the company feels like it: I am going to assume you don't know how multiplayer gaming works. As a case study, I give you Unreal 2's eXpanded MultiPlayer (the fact that I am willing to capitalize it correctly should give you a hint to how much I loved it). REALLY fun game. But eventually, the master server was taken down. And the entire community died. There are still small pockets, but the game essentially died. All they had to do was shut down "one" server. Then nobody can connect.
So if Activision wanted to kill off CoD1's multiplayer: They could. EASILY. They just haven't bothered.

Nah this is nothing to do with greed, it seems a matter of size & business attitude.
Valve were & are a comparatively small company with a very small release schedule. Unless I'm mistaken, they're only ever made 2 games, halflife 1 & 2, everything else they've released was community made mods that they bought the rights to and polished up (was left 4 dead a mod as well? I'm a bit hazy on that one). The limited releases they make mean that they have the time and motivation for fostering a community in the hopes of long term financial benefit. Counterstrike proved that modders could not only extend the life of a product causing more sales of the core game (generating mid life revenue and keeping the company going) but modders could also be bought out and become employees giving a major return on investment when they can SELL copies of counterstrike rather than just show the extra cool things you could do if you bought half life. I don't think its unreasonable to suspect that without mods for half life 1, we'd not have half life 2 (and steam) today.
Activision, by contrast, is a major corporation with a widely diversified list of games and development studios. If Game A doesn't sell as well as they hoped, its a lot less of an issue because they always have a new game in the pipeline. That sort of fire and forget attitude is less likely to foster long term community support but that isn't financially neccessary to keep the company going because they always have a fallback. If fostering a long term community though features like mod support, clan support and the like isn't neccessary for long term success and costs money to implement, there's little point in a large company doing it.

L4D involved them buying the studio that did CS: Condition Zero (I think) and paying them to develop a game.
They "bought" some random guy who made a cool Portal-like game for his term project at a university to do Portal. And they did something similar for that new game everyone keeps mentioning (a DotA-clone, I think) that I can't find any details on.
Half-Life and Blue Shift (I think) were made by "Valve proper".
Opposing Forces (best of the GldSrc, by the way :p) was by Gearbox, as evidenced by the endboss of OF being the endboss of Borderlands. Shepard was hardcore.
HL2 is "Valve proper", as are the episodes.
Pretty sure Team Fortress 2 is also largely "Valve proper", but I wouldn't be surprised if they bought a few members of that mod team too.
CS was a mod that got bought. Not sure if the team that works on it is more "Valve proper" than not though (grey area). Same with Day of Defeat (the forgotten little brother of CS, characterized by deployable machine guns and rifle grenades that people don't bitch about).
Think I covered all the Valve games.
As for the Activision approach: The thing to remember is, that "fire and forget" mentality means they can take a LOT more risks. And that is a VERY good thing.
The only game Valve ever really took a chance on was Portal, and even that was a no-brainer for being awesome (and was actually sold as an incentive with Ep2 and TF2 anyway). Everything else they make is a pretty standard First Person Shooter. Why? Because people like FPSes. Hell, one could actually argue that Valve are less creative than most of the major dev teams, since they never stray too far from their comfort zone. But when you release one game every few years, you need to make sure that game is going to be popular. Steam has given them a lot more freedom, but I still don't see any new ideas coming from them (even Portal 2 is pretty heavily inspired by all the Portal ripoffs). Does that make them any better or worse than other devs? Nope.
With the "fire and forget" mentality, you can take pretty big risks. I can't name any from Activision off the top of my head (I don't really pay attention to publishers, I generally focus on dev teams), but let's use EA. Spore. Like it or not, that was a huge risk. It was a game that really wasn't the standard PC gaming fair. And it sort of bombed (because PC gamers didn't want that kind of game). But it represents the exact thing everyone always begs for: Taking a risk to give us something new. Same with Black & White, to a lesser degree.
As an example of how NOT to do things: Introvision (or whatever they are called). They release a new game every few years, and it is always a niche game (and, in the case of Darwinia, kind of sucked...). Microsoft had to yell at them and teach them how to do proper game design with the XBOX version of Darwinia. And, as a result, the fans have had to go around and spam other forums begging people to buy games or give donations (I count at least two times :p). They don't have the capital from a "fire and forget" mentality or the Bethesda/Valve/pre-2005 Epic "make people worship us to the point that they will buy anything we put out there" approach.

Blue Shift was developed by Gearbox. Team Fortress was a mod until Valve bought the team. I'd hesitate to avoid calling something like Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, or any other game under Valve's banner "Valve-made". Many of the different talent scooped up like that also work on other projects with the other teams Valve owns. Even some of the plain-old Valve employees get assigned to help out with Counter-Strike and TF2-related projects. Valve is a unique developer in that they have several branches that work on different projects and occasionally work together.

:) QFT

I have to step in and give my two cents here. Spore did not fail because it was "different" and "PC gamers don't want that". It's "difference" is what would have made it a huge success. The reason it didn't was that EA panicked somewhere along the way, and changed the target demographic of the game away from scientifically minded adults to the average The Sims-player. The game was tremendously dumbed down and "cute-i-fied" in the process, which came as a huge disappointment to all the people who had followed its development over the years. Think of it as advertising a new Star Wars movie, which on release turns out to be an episode of Pokémon. That's a sure recipe for failure.

I followed Spore, and the only thing that ended up being "dumbed down" was the "4x game" at the end. And technically, that WAS a 4x game, just not what we were used to.
Beyond that, it was mostly a matter of people filling in all the blanks with their own hopes and desires.
Nah, I think it would be more appropriate to think of it as advertising a new Star Wars movie that is supposed to investigate the history and origins of Darth Vader, and then everyone wanting to kill themselves after finding out he was a little kid named Annie. :p
Either way though, this discussion is irrelevant. Point is, Spore was different. And EA's ability to pound out games and not need them to make profit is the reason why.

I can't figure out why people get so upset over a lock of mods. When I buy toilet paper, I don't expect Charmin to provide me with tools to make my own. Coca Cola doesn't give me the recipe to make my own Coke.
It's a $50 or $60 game that's meant for entertainment, that isn't even a large amount of money. It's a game, get over it. Play the game, have a few hours of fun and move on.

IT ISNT JUST A GAME!!!!11111112211111111!ZOMG
A game company does not normally give out source code, they may Like the Coca Cola Company put what is in it on the label.
My cocoa puffs *Ingredients* Whole Grain Corn, Sugar, Corn Syrup, Corn Meal, Canola and or rice bran oil, etc etc etc :) If I really wanted to make my own with that list I at least have a baseline of what to expect to put into it :p

I know right now that if you were to make Coco Puffs you'd fail at it. You forgot the cocaine.

People are still playing Modern Warfare 2? It's only good for a playthrough of the easy-ass campaign.

Hey, I still play it from time to time. Clocked up 50+ hours in MP.