flagship on 25 October 2008
Rare and Lionshead will probably be fully independent by the end of next year, I'm guessing Ensemble got shut down because no one was willing to buy the studio without the IP rights to Age of Empires. The new Microsoft strategy will probably include farming out established franchises to 3rd party developers.
All in all it's probably allowing MS to buy the kinds of games they want rather than shifting development crews from projects such as Perfect Dark to Viva Pinata and buying exclusivity/timed exclusivity is probably cheaper than actually developing the game.
