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.

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.

I suppose Starcraft 2 selling 1 million in a day doesn't count? Or the fact that as of October 2007 Age of Empires 3 had sold over 2 million copies. RTS games are still pretty big.

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.

That's is completely wrong. The best studio MS has is 343 Studios.

crissindahouse said:

you say:

"People shouldn't over praise exclusives like they're the only games worth playing. Most of the games I play are multi except for the Kinect ones, Halo and Forza, I don't see what the competition can do better if I'm going to play the same games."

this makes no sense. if they make a lot exclusives which you wish to play, you have to buy the console. that's what the competition can do better.

- Yes if there are so many games I want to play and most of them are exclusive yes I will buy that console but just because games are exclusives doesn't mean they're better games and their exclusiveness doesn't makes them better than multi games.

nobody says that a game with exactly the same quality would be better if it would be an exclusive. who said this?

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you like kinect? aren't the games exclusives? do you think microsoft would have kinect and games like kinect sports if sony wouldn't be there with own exclusive stuff?

- Why not? The only reason Kinect games are exclusives is because Kinect is exclusive to the Xbox. Look at a motion game like Dead Space Extraction, same game but not available on 360 just PS3 and Wii. When it was only on the Wii it wasn't better than the PS3 version. It's the same with Kinect, would Sony have something similar I wouldn't care weather it's on 360 or PS3 if it's good, it's good.

yeah sure but without wii there wouldn't be kinect and there wouldn't be ps move. microsoft is developing games like kinect sport to have something the others don't have. sure that's only one reason the other is to sell kinect and make money with it but they are only on the market because they are exclusives! almost every industry needs competition and so bigger the competition is so better will be the products. that's very simple

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sure you can have the same fun with a game if it isn't an exclusive but without god of war and uncharted i wouldn't own a ps3. so the competition made better third person games so i had to buy a ps3 even with a xbox from day one.

- I understand this concept perfectly. I favor the 360 because of Halo but like I said earlier, except for Halo I could careless weather a game is exclusive or not. New games to me are new games, new exclusives to me are still new games and they can be as bad as multi.

i don't get it...i think as well that i don't care if a game is an exclusive but with exclusives the market has more games. i can chose between forza and gt for example. if we wouldn't have these exclusives ther would be only forza or gt. f sony and microsoft would work together there wouldn't be a forza and for me i like forza more so yeah it's great we have exclusives.

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if you don't like to play these games it's ok but to say that the ps3  could have thousand exclusives all better than the best xbox game which would be all on the playstation as well and you would still buy the 360 makes no sense. but you don't need the ps3 then right? because if the games wouldn't be excluisves they would have the same quality.

- The thing is this generation has brought incredible multiplatform games. I favor devs more than Console manufacturers. I'm not gaming like my life depends on it so unless a game is really the kind I like I wouldn't justify buying another console just because it's an exclusive. I really wish consoles were more like PC and people would think about buying games before buying consoles and try hard to defend them like it's the second coming.

i have never seen people more defending something than pc-gamers defending the pc and talking about their great  monitor having more pixels as the other guy and whatever.

maybe not in america but here in germany where the pc gaming market is almost as big as the console market it's horrible with the pc-gaming scene

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exclusives are exclusives it doesn't help you that the games would have the same quality as non exclusives. btw the quality isn't the same. uncharted 3 would never look as good as it does as non exclusive. so i would be happy that it is an exlusive ps3 game if i wouldn't hate the ps3 controller so much.

- That is your opinion. Graphics are not all in games. I prefer a multi game like Mass Effect or Skyrim over an exclusive like Uncharted. They may not be as pretty but they are more open and offer a dialogue system beyond anything exclusives has done so far.

no that's not my opinion. i prefer skyrim above uncharted as well but that's not the point. if you would prefer uncharted because of the gameplay and you would have a playstation 3 then you would be happy to have better graphics than it would have as non exclusive.  

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and at least since exclusives are competition for non exclusives as well all developers will make better games as they would without exclusives.

- I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

i mean that i think because of the "war" between sony and microsoft to make awesome stuff as competition against each other, games of other developers who make the games for both consoles have to be better as well to have a chance on this market

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without halo for example we would maybe still have not the healt sytem every game uses nowadays and this was a revolution. without halo we would have  medipacks everywhere lol.

- Halo would've come out eventualy even if MS didn't bought Bungie. Devs make the games and they would have the same ideas even if they weren't exclusive.

no clue about that so ypu could be right. 

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if someone makes a racing game he has forza and gt as competition. there wouldn't be a forza for 360 without gt. so if there wouldn't be forza an gt maybe other racing games like shift would be worse than they are.

- That doesn't make sense. Your logic imply that games on PC are all bad because they are all on the same platform. If a dev wants people to buy their game they are still in competition with other devs so they have to make a better game than the other devs. EA's Battlefield is a good example because their competitor is Activision not a console manufacturer. They put their games on every gaming media they can put them on. So even if there was no GT or Forza there would still be racing games trying to be better than the other dev's racing game.

no pc games aren't all bad but i have never seen so many good games for the pc then on all consoles together. the games there are good as well because of the small competition they have form other games for the pc but that's really not like what we see on consoles.

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exclusives are the best the industry has. everyone if profiting of that. the quality would be not even close to the quality we have without the exclusive games (which counts for non exclusives as well)

- Exclusives are the worst the industry has actualy. You think a company like EA would like to go exclusive to a console manufacturer? Hell no! They don't care and they don't need to be exclusive to make good games and money. Not everybody can afford to buy multiple consoles so gamers lose because of this. Companies would like to sell to as much gamers as possible but a company like Naughty Dog can sell only to those Sony convinced to buy a PS3. Companies like EA on the other hand sell to anyone that wants to play their games.

and what's the point? i get a profit if naughty dog only makes games for the ps3. better graphics. if people can't efford miore than one console than they can't affor many games so this shouldn't be a problem for them.

for people who can afford all consoles like me it's great to have exclusives. on wii i get the nintendo style games and for example i'm not sure if i would have a kinect sports if kinect would have a nintendos wii sport game so i can choose which one is better for me.  for playstation i get the games with better graphics as long as they are exclusives and on xbox 360 i can play a game like forza wich wouldn't be on the market without the competition between sony and microsoft.

exclusives mean a bigger competition which forces the console manufacturers to "fight" against each other. thsi is never bad to get a great versatile and quality on a market for whatever.

sure if you don't have money you can't afford all of taht it's like all car manufacturers would produce the same cars. we wouldn't have as muc cars as we have and that's the great, the compete against each other and we have this huge market. as bigger the competitions as less can we afford of all the car market percentual but it's still better than only 10 cars which wouldnt have the same quality.

Bungie left, but a lot of the halo team stayed, so no harm. Rare makes more money now than they did before kinect. Ensamble was a money pit, A 200 man studio that made only rts games and all of their other stuff got canned. Bioware was not worth buying with pandemic, EA paid almost 1 billion for them and they still have yet to recoup their costs. Team Ninja Imploded, that has nothing to do with MS. How is turn 10 having trouble selling their games? They constantly sell 4.5 million copies of their game. Forza 4 came out against way more blockbusters than Forza 3 did and still managed to sell 1 million in about a month and a half.