Microsoft is investing in their first party studios like never before.

[Scoobes]

Lucas-Rio said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Lucas-Rio said:
Microsoft has by far the worst first and second party studio among the 3 manufacturer.

They don't care about developping games. They closed their best studio, Ensemble Studio without any reason. They turned Rare into a joke.

It will take a very long time until they are taken seriously as a developper.

Nonsense, Halo a lone puts them over Sony in my book.

They closed down Ensemble because they didn't need them. Ensemble's best days were behind them. If MS feels the need to put out more strategy games I'm sure Robot Entertainment would be glad to help.

Rare has played a pretty big roll in the 360 appealing to casual audiences. Something PS3 has been struggling to do. So I'd hardly say Rare is a joke.

It only takes one great game to be taken as a serious develeloper.

Rare is a joke. They went from an universally acclaimed  developper on Suoer Nintendo and Nintendo 64 to a very average developper to xobox, to a bad developper to Xbox 360.Now they are done. They are doing some Wii sport copies that any studio could do. They are dead.

Halo is a big franchise, but Bungie is not even with Microsoft anymore. And the diversity of Sony developpers annilates Microsoft.

Ensemble Studio was better than any studio Microsoft still has. The way they threated them was digusting. They forced them to make a dumbed down RTS for 8 years olds kids (Halo wars) then they closed them eventough it outsold pretty much all of the Rare shovelwares titles.

Ensemble were closed because they started to cost too much money. They were due to create a (rather expensive) Halo MMO which was canned. With MS shifting focus onto 360 development they felt Ensemble were less relevant and didn't bother to wait for Halo Wars to be released before announcing the closure.

MS handled the whole affair wrong. They could have made some changes to the studio, cut the staff etc. but they just shut them down in a knee-jerk reaction. A pretty stupid decision imo as they then decided to make Age of Empires Online (which is quite good actually) and ended up using the ex-Ensemble guys at Robot Entertainment anyway.