Robert Bowling’s name has come up more times in the last few weeks than I can count.  Recently Bowling sat down with OXM and spoke about how Infinity Ward knew “the game we want to make” and left Activision out of it until later in development.  Bowling also said that “the only opinion we care about is what our fans think.”

Bowling talked about how they used social tools like Facebook and Twitter among others to stay in touch the with the fans and ask what they wanted to see in the game.  This brings up an interesting point in a way, could this be a part of what Neil Thompson meant when he said social tools are the “heart” of xbox’s future?  Will developers use these tools to connect with Xbox users right from their 360s and will PS3 maybe follow?

Back on track though, Bowling spoke of how they took the feedback and wanted to get it on track with, “what they wanted to see,” “what they had planned,” and “what they already had done.”  Bowling then said something that should make MW2 fans happy,

That’s really what’s important, our relationship with us and our fans, and not so much us and Activision, or us and retailers or anything like that.

With everything we’ve seen on MW2 only being bigger and better, it seems Bowling isn’t kidding around when he said all of that stuff.  Already having a huge fan following and over a million pre-orders I think they did something right.  Modern Warfare 2 is set to release November 10th.

Infinity Ward kept Modern Warfare 2 secret from Activision [OXM]