Each to their own I suppose. Rare have done a lot more for the 360 then they did for Nintendo in my opinion for the reasons I have stated earlier in this thread. Repeating myself is kind of annoying. They have become less of a games developer these days then a very large developer of many things. They made Perfect Dark on the XBLA, it appeared to do rather well.

Though this is obviously an opinion, I am clearly not going to change my mind and you will not yours. MS needs to make money that is why the entered the consoles department. They didnt just enter to beat sony or nintendo they entered to help establish their brand.

I know they are crazy, wanting to make money jeez crazy bastardos o.0

the biggest mistake MS made was not aquiring bioware. the mass effect series, dragon age, and future games would be 360 exclusive. swtor might have been pc and 360. bioware is such a huge company. they have like 800 employs they are going to be making a game a year or more from now on. ea boaught them and pandemic for like 900 million. that is a baragon for such an amazing dev.

In your previous post you stated:

"You as a game buyer would also prefer one sublime game to three good games, wouldn't you?"

That's more what I was responding to (should have made that clearer). It read more like you were stating that it's better for consumers to have less games, less choice and potentially, less innovation. From the manufacturers POV this is not neccessarily the case but they each seem to recognise the value of having exclusives in a range of genres. Yes, it's very important to sell large numbers of units (and to sell to the 1-4 title per year group), but exclusives for console manufacturers also have the added incentive of expanding the consumer base. By having stand-out titles in a range of genres you effectively make the console more attractive to a wide array of potential customers.

The other plus side to this is that 3rd-party software in the same genres are likely to get a boost if an exclusive can garner interest. How many purchased more FPS' due to their experience with Halo for instance?

The thing is, games which sell to people who buy fewer games are the ones which sell consoles. These are the titles which stand out from the crowd. The majority of games which cater to more niche tastes have always generally and will probably even more so continue to come from third parties given the wide pool of developer talent and general experimentation. There is no really good reason for a console maker to pursue these kinds of games as major retail releases because they don't tend to sell consoles nor are they safe bets in terms of making money overall.

Since a console maker has a dual incentive to release console software to both make money and sell consoles, their biggest objective can be summed up by 'go big or go home'. So in the context of Microsoft aquiring developers, they already have the biggest single console RPG series in Fable  so why would they want to spend $700M on a developer whose games thus far haven't exceeded 3M on a single console, in a genre they already do well in? It is a bad purchase which makes me wonder why EA did it in the first place. There aren't any real developers in the wild worth aquiring outside of Respawn or Harmonix which I can see. However given the fact that both have gained their independence recently they would be hard targets to aquire.

Bugie, epic games n Remedy, these three developers have a good relationship with M$. it was quite foolish for M$ not to acquire them.

you thoughts.