| Twistedpixel said: 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. |
Ensemble had shipped games in 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, that's not once every 3 years. The second team also did a lot of R&D, and was in charge of the proposed Halo MMO. Regardless, the factory line mentality is what you seem to like more, I don't support the "1 game per year or per 2 years" mentality, you do a game with maximum quality and without rushing it. The only way you do AAA games yearly or every 2 years is with huge budgets and huge teams, which just increases the cost, which is the whole point, not having insane costs.
Bioware are a huge company NOW, they opened a third location and were put in charge of Mythic after EA bought them. MS has still supported (in a limited way) PC publishing, can you imagine Mass Effect (without the constant rumours), Dragon Age, and The Old Republic, all 360-only or PC360? That would be insanely huge for MS! ME has done great without the PS3, and Dragon Age has sold worse on the PS3, so I don't see what profitability problem there is there. Maybe you are referring to the 42 million KZ2 cost (plus marketing), or the 60 million GT5 is costing (plus marketing)?
As for Epic, yes, that's what has stopped anyone buying them, they make a lot of money out of selling the engine. But it could still work, initially there was no easy PS3 Unreal until Epic ported UT3, and MS could easily make Unreal Engine the "xbox engine", available at competitive pricing to people developing 360 or PC360 titles, which would make a lot of devs really consider if it was wise or not to develop for PS3. Don't underestimate pipeline advantages, i've worked with Unreal on more than 1 occasion, even if MS only bought them now, several companies have an entire pipeline or franchise based on the UE technology.
Anyway, it's not like MS cares, Gears and now Shadow Complex are 360 exclusives anyway. I would just do it diferently.
