Microsoft Has Put Themselves Back In The Game!

[Cerebralbore101]

There's a huge difference between a company home growing it's own IPs and games, vs a company simply buying it's own IPs and games from a stock of already existing 3rd party developers.

People whine and bitch about exclusives not being on their console of choice, when the fact of the matter is many Sony/Nintendo exclusives never would have existed if not for Sony/Nintendo. This is not the case for a majority of Xbox "exclusives" though. Those games would have existed as 3rd party offerings regardless of Microsoft's acquisitions.

The sad thing is that MS has a pretty bad track record when it comes to buying studios, when you look at the long term.

Rare: Purchased and forced to make Kinect games. Hasn't made a high quality game in over ten years now.

Ensemble Studios: Shuttered

Lionhead: Forced to make Kinect crap, and shuttered

Mojang: Still makes minecraft. This one turned out okay.

Microsoft's other acquisitions are too recent to be able to take a long term style look at.

Edit: I don't think all of these closures, or lack of good games are entirely MS' fault. Rare was already on a downward spiral when MS bought them. Same could be said for Lionhead's internal problems, despite the greatness of Fable II. But what I don't think MS has the capability of doing is taking a failing studio and saving them. They aren't like Sony. They won't be able to take a bad studio like Compulsion games and turn them into a good studio, in the same way that Sony did with Guerilla.

I think Obsidian is going to be just fine under MS.

343 is going to make consistently worse games over the years.

Bethesda's main branch will continue to suck with Fallout 76. I expect Starfield, and ESVI to be letdowns.

Doom/Dishonored will still be good franchises.

Doublefine will be a coin toss.

Wasteland 4 will be good. The second that dev makes anything other than the Wasteland series though, will be a bad time.

Undead Labs will continue to suck.

Ninja Theory will make Hellblade 2 be awesome, but their non-Hellblade stuff is pretty hit or miss.

Gears 6,7,8,9,10, etc. will be good, but will have more and more MTX thrown in.

Last edited by Cerebralbore101 - on 28 September 2020