The "New" M$ Game Studios...

[heruamon]

makingmusic476 said:

heruamon said:

vlad321 said:
If I'm not mistaken Bungie was its own studio, not owned by M$ at all, it can't be dissolved like Ensemble was. On the other hand Ensemble was owned by M$ hence what is happening. The name Ensemble by itself holds a lot of weight with gamers, especially ones that have been around the block a few times. Except Liongate I haven't heard of any of the current MGS studios, and I've only seen crappy to mediocre games churned out by Lionhead so it is not the good type of knowing. Bad move M$.

 

 No, you're mistaken, Microsoft wholly owned Bungie, but they spun them off to avoid a defection.  it was making the best out of a bad situation, but still not optimal for M$. 

"Bungie is an American video game developer founded in May 1991 under the name Bungie Software Products Corporation by two undergraduate students at the University of Chicago, Alex Seropian and Jason Jones. Originally based in Chicago, the company concentrated primarily on Macintosh games during its first nine years of existence, producing the popular Marathon and Myth series as well as games such as Oni. In 2000, Bungie was acquired by Microsoft, and their current project Halo: Combat Evolved was turned into a first-person shooter and launch title for Microsoft's new Xbox game console. Halo went on to become the Xbox's "killer app", and the game and its two sequels have sold millions of copies.

On October 5, 2007, Bungie announced that it had split with Microsoft and become a privately held independent company, Bungie LLC. Despite splitting from Microsoft, the studio will still be producing products for Xbox 360 but is free to develop for other platforms. Bungie is an independent developer, currently based in Kirkland, Washington."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie

The question is, why'd they want to defect, as you suppose they did?

Sony seems to have no trouble keeping relatively independent studios under it's control while keeping them happy and producing games at a reasonable pace.

Naughty Dog, Evolution Studios, Incognito, Polyphony Digital, Sony Santa Monica, etc. are all prime examples of this.

 

I don't think M$ is going to get rid of all their 1st party independently operating studios, but I DO think they are going to heavily bolster the MGS brand to put out 1st party stuff.  Take for example, M$ enters a patnership with "said" developer and the IP is owned by M$, but developed by somebody else...no worries about losing your exclusive content, and the developer isn't going to mess up a gravvy train.  WRT Sony's ability to keep their stuidos untouched...hmmm...that's not quite true, but anyway, and anyway, in stacking coporate performance of M$ against Sony is like pissing in hurricane force winds...