Which of the MS-purchased studios do you think will be shut down?

[Mr Puggsly]

Raven722 said:
If I had to guess I'd say Compulsion, followed by Undead Labs later on. I'm still not even sure what Microsoft was thinking buying Compulsion. Neither of their two games were good. Compared to acquisitions like Playground, Obsidian, and Ninja Theory them buying Compulsion really had me scratching my head. The only thing I can think of is that they threw out offers to a bunch of different studios trying to snag whoever they could at the time and Compulsion agreed. That or Compulsion heard they were in the market for new studios and approached them. Because I'm really having a hard time imagining anyone looking at their portfolio and thinking they'd be worth spending the money on if they weren't just trying to grab whoever they could. Maybe they have something up their sleeve that Microsoft thought would be great and perhaps they'll shock me but I really can't help but feel it was a purchase for the sake of having more studios.

Undead Labs isn't nearly as bad as Compulsion and considering their relationship with Microsoft it made a lot more sense. That being said, I don't find them to be a studio worthy of any real praise. Their first effort was good enough but their second game clearly didn't hit the mark. Now that's not to say they won't do better. After all, Sony bought Guerrilla Games after their first two games, Shellshock and Killzone. The first being really bad and the second being mediocre. They went on to make two great sequels and now are being lumped into Sony's top tier talent after Horizon. So it's very possible that a more structured environment with even more support and resource sharing could do for Undead Labs what it did for Guerrilla Games. I'm just wary of their history,

I suspect MS made all these purchases with projects we don't know about being worked on already.

I suspect Compulsion had another project in development while they completed We Happy Few. If MS wanted them maybe it was an action game? Who knows.

Not sure what the plan with Undead Labs is, but State of Decay is a surprisingly popular IP. So maybe the next game in the series is going to be far more ambitious and it seems like they have a pretty good grasp of UE4 compared to some other games using the same engine.

Anyhoo, I think this gen MS learned a lesson by trying to rely on 3rd parties that aren't particularly loyal to them. Also, MS should be more willing to pour money into them as well.