Translation : "It hurts. May you all Bungie scumbags die in hell. But please make Halo Reach another AAA game first before going PS3 / 360."

Priceless. So looks like MS doesn't know the definition of a 1st party dev either. Or they lie again.

Their PR talks look more and more like Iraqi Information Minister stuff recently, between that and "FF13 will sell more on 360" (that one was hilarious, they were outsold like 3 or 4:1). Next PR : "There are no tanks in Bagdad, we're winning the war" ?

Here is a reminder MS :

"In the video game industry, a first-party developer is a developer that is part of a company that actually manufactures a video game console."

List of 1st party devs, strangely Bungie is not on it :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:First-party_video_game_developers

Bad journalism or another MS lie ?

I don't see MS acquiring any new studios. They would most likely go the route of forming new studios as they have learned their lesson that there is a large change in the studio post purchase. But most likely they will probably just work out deals with devs to get exclusive titles.

I'm not very sad. I never liked Bungie that much.

This is good for Microsoft since it puts pressure on them to aquire new studios and strengthen their internal game development.

For example they could buy Remedy and should build a new team to make Age of Empires again.

Yea, I was going off memory, and I mixed up Forza 2 and Fable 2's numbers.

Yeah it is sad though. Alot of guys at Bunie wanted the company to be free and independant. So will they leave now a much worse Activision is at the helm? This is all gonna go horribly wrong. I just hope before it does thatall devs jump ship to 343. 343 has got some big names from Bungie already. SOme are staying to finish Reach and move after. I think M$ are planning a big Halo 4 for next gen. Reach will be the last on 360.

Activision is not at the helm of Bungie.  They are at the helm of 1 IP that Bungie is working on.  One would hope that Bungie managed to get at least a good deal of creative freedom in their contract.  And we should all hope that Bungie employees do not start jumping ship(and I am certain that they will not), because Bungie is world class and we want them to stay that way regardless of publisher.  It is all about games, is it not?

Didn't Bungie say recently that they might revisit Halo in 10 years?

Really? I don't think bungie are the kind of developers that would commit to a 10 year deal with a publisher if they thought their staff would leave. Besides it's only a publishing deal for one IP in particular, Activision don't own them, so wtf are you talking about?

They must really hate MS to leave them for Activision Blizzard...

It tells a lot about the bad relations between MS and the studios working on 360.

I agree with this. I mean if MS bought Valve or Epic half of that company would leave cause they are millionares and don't need to work anymore.