Ensemble was ineffectual in that they had two full development teams and yet produced a game only about once every 3 years. Not as a developer but as a business. Personally I wish that Ensemble, Flight sim guys, FASA etc were cut loose ala Bungie rather than closed down.
As for Bioware, they are a HUGE company. You couldn't justify a 500 strong developer for a single console manufacturer. Bioware would have essentially made up over half of Microsoft game studios by themselves. They'd need to sell something in the order of 2-2.5M copies of games per year in order to break even and a console manufacturer cannot always ensure that as theres always a couple of years with every console transition where game sales are lower on the mainline console.
Lastly, Epic is worth money because they are independant. As soon as they are owned by one of the big publishers their value is diminished as they cannot sell their engine as easily.
Do you know what its like to live on the far side of Uranus?
