How's this?  MS is working on consistently making Xbox Live the best online service available for consoles. MS is working on improving the highly entertaining Kinect peripheral.  MS is working on brand awareness of the Xbox - promotional giveaways, comic books, movie shorts, board games, action figures, shirts, decals, merchandise merchandise merchandise!  I think all of the above certainly provides depth for both hardcore gamers and casual gamers alike.  They are focusing themselves as being more than video games all while brining the world of video games to the mainstream public.  If they are already spending all this money on the development of their killer system, why should they have to be developing games constantly for it also?  The games they do publish typically come out as wickedly addictive and easily marketable.. sounds like a smart strategy to me!

They need to get another first party studio for jrpgs.

MS has made their strategy pretty clear and so far it seems to be the correct one.  Use of third and second party development companies has been their main focus.  MS has correctly recognizedthat the gaming market is over saturated and pushing out too many titles only leads to less sales and more financial losses.  It always great for us to come on here and say how one console has more games than the other but there are only so many dollars to go around.  Their will be Gears 3, Halo remake, Skyrim, Dragon Age II, COD ?, Crysis 2, Kingdoms.  That right there is more games than most people can purchase in 2 years let alone one.  More and more development companies are losing money with highger costs and market saturation so instead of pumping out a bunch of titles that may not even reach 1million in sales, MS has it right and will make sure that they have strong number of big name titles each pushing well over 5 million.  The developers win and MS wins.

What games? The only really popular games are gears and call of duty

I don't really care whether it's first party of not, but more interesting titles.  Activision and EA are moving more and more to titles that deliver $$$, so M$ will have to look inward for more freash IPs to keep people interested.  Kinect has been a great success, but I would certianly hope that it isn't the only focus of 1st and 2nd party developers.

Their lineup will probably be better than their 2009 lineup, which was pretty much Halo Wars, ODST, and Forza 3.

At least Forza is a really great game and i doubt the 4th will disappoint but one game can't make up for a whole party I guess.

I don't see why it matters who a game comes from though? Why are first party exclusives more important than third party ones? I've always judged Microsoft as a publisher, whether or not they own the studio is irrelevant to me.

Perhaps because third party exclusives can end up being timed. Thus annoying some gamers and doing less to differentiate the system from the competition in the long run.

For the record I have no beef with MS's exclusive list, the 360 has tons of amazing exclusive games.  Gears 3 FTW.  This thread is just focusing on the 1st party in particular, which at this point is looking like its not doing much at all.  Not the overall exclusive list of the 360.