Is Microsoft Game Studios just lazy or what?

[heruamon]

Recon1O1 said:
Lazy if you want but most of MS recent decisions seem to have limited their potential losses in an industry that is having serious issues with profitability. EA are reeling their way to another multi-billion dollar loss this fiscal year despite owning many of the brightest lights in their genres. The list of failed developers for 2009 is shocking and financial and job losses staggering.

See noname2200's - 2009 Game Studio Body Count Thread (from Penny arcade) or
" - 11,500 job losses since late 2008, (from M2 Research figures)

Hindsight is 20/20 but after the initial expenditure of 4B or so to prevent Sony from taking over your living room and relegating PC's to the office in the basement. MS have played the game fairly conservatively.

While they may be perceived as backing the failed HD tech. they actually never built HI Def in the box and limited their losses there. The 360 itself is a more traditional take on systems design that required less adaptation from studios working on PC or last gen. consoles.

The lack of 1st party studios may mean less profit than with Nintendo's huge 1st party IPs but it also limits their losses in the far more expensive and risky business of HD game development.

To prev. posters who claim Sony is benefitting this assumes the JRPG's who were allowed to jump ship are huge moneymakers. Bioshock and Ninja Gaiden are great games but were not huge sellers for MS and their performance on PS3 falls somewhere between decent and dismal.

MS remain in control of their most profitable IPs and add to a consistenly black bottom line with the lions share of the best selling Multi-Plats, all at costs decided on by MS alone.

It's all about risk and rewards...and M$ has taken a very conservative approach to gaming content...now Natal is a HUGE risk, but considering that Wii has already taken the major risk, it's somewhat of a very calculated gamble by M$, rather than a huge bet.  The issue as I see it is that M$ has tons of potential AAA IP, but they are laying dormant and gathering dust.  MGS was re-tool 2 years ago, and if you look at the development cycle of a game...it is about 2-4 years for most projects...and we've seen nothing to date from them.