I think it is marginally safe to say that Black Tusk and Victoria. Are positioned to be oriented towards core gaming. The statements made, and the management of said studios. Seem to be more in line with the core game philosophy then the casual philosophy. While Redmond has enough staff to take on many different roles. So I think it is safe to say that there are some new core studios in this list.

I am just saying we shouldn't be discounting them all as Kinect studios, or as support studios. In both regards in would seem to be superfluous. Microsoft can't possibly need as many as half a dozen first party kinect games in a year, and third parties only need so much support.

The important studios are the ones which release 5M+ selling franchises. The hardcore buy say 3-9 titles per year whereas a casual gamer may only buy 1-2 a year over a generation. If your title sells over 5M you're addressing a casual market which is far larger in size than the hardcore market which is why small titles don't sell nearly as many consoles as larger titles. It doesn't matter how many 1-3M selling franchises you have, it really only matters if you can release 5 and especially 10M selling franchises. Numbers of studios don't make a library but the overall appeal of your biggest titles.

well number wise, yea you can say pound for pound.

based on team size, and the number of ip that can come from each studio Sony has, then they can't be matched by number of studios, or total amount of games vs MS. Sony at this point is clearly the 80 ton guerilla in the room.

i think it needs to be pointed out that naughty dog split into two "studios". the uncharted team and the last of us team. i think guerilla and sucker punch split too.

this essentially represents the side i hate about the game the industry at the moment :/ Saying that 1-3M franchise don't matter and that they should focus on 5M seller just makes me sad inside. I mean the very fact that we are in this website means that we care about games and should be asking for more variety and niche games. The day that five game franchises or genres are all that sales, and everything else fails, is the day i quit.

and before you reply thats the reality that we live in... let me give u a respond to that.... I don't give a fuck. I play games of all colors and sizes. 

This is common sense guys. Sorry to shoot you Microsoft fans down, but when it comes to first party developer talent, Sony takes the cake and it's not even really close.

If you rank every game released based on reviews, Sony also wins.
If you rank based on sales, an easy win for Microsoft. IMO because of the more casual fans on the 360 and how much more the Xbox brand appeals to everyday consumers.

The hardcore market are the few million people that support the smaller titles. The mainstream market supports the console itself so you need both to succeed. The former makes for a healthy varied console library and the latter is required to turn your minor hit into a smash hit. If you don't have hardcore gamers your sales fall off a cliff between top performers and the next best and if you don't have casuals you get a lot of similarly performing games which don't sell to fantastic levels. The truth is if you want a game with impact you've got to release a title which will bring new people in and not just resonate around your core userbase. The duty of a first party developer is to sell consoles and develop a market so the best team of first party developers are the people who can do that,

@kitler53

I avoided the issue of teams, because Sony and Microsoft seem to use entirely different methodologies. Microsoft seems to approach game development as a large group effort. Meaning that many studios can work on the same game at the same time. While Sony seems to prefer to make self contained units, and differentiate them by name. That isn't to say that Microsoft never uses teams internally. They probably do, but they aren't permanent fixtures that last for many years. They just put them together to get a job done, and once that project is finished they are split up, and moved to other projects.

I am sure there are arguments to be made for both approaches, but fundamentally there isn't any real difference between a studio of a hundred, and a studio split into two teams of fifty. The output should remain the same. In the end both will release two games in the same time frame. There is also a small problem of if we try to guess how many teams these studios can run concurrently. We first need to know the number of people that they have employed, and that information isn't particularly easy to come by.

Well to be more concise it isn't particularly good data to work from. When I did find numbers while researching this thread. They were generic estimates, outdated figures, or from second or third hand sources. What does it mean if the Victoria studio can employ between fifty and sixty people, but the studio can expand into adjoining floors if they want to increase staff. Will we be in a position to know that if it happens. Given the first account is being made by a member of that cities chamber of commerce.

Anyway I don't want to go there. Even if we can scour out the data for all the studios in question, and figure out what their total manpower actually is. We still have a small problem of the data being terribly unreliable. Another poster brought up something along those lines in this thread. They of coarse assumed that Sony somehow had more staff, but we can't know that for certain. Anymore then we can know how many Microsoft is employing. It just isn't doable.

It's funny, cause Microsoft fans want their first parties to diversify, grow and put out more games to compete with Sony's quantity and range. Whilst Sony fans want them to actually focus in on their exclusives, market them and make them actually sell like Microsoft's games do.

I think the list is hard to read much from in terms of actual Sony / Microsoft published exclusives - for example 4 of Sony's published exclusives this year came from studios not in your list. In fact I can't even think of an exclusive any of the studio's you listed that came out this year for PS3. Odd year. I think it's risky counting a lot of the Microsoft studio's which have released nothing too - I reckon only the Canadian ones will produce big IP's.

Either way it seems both companies have let a host of their 'big' studios go into hibernation now, quietly working on PS4 / 720 projects. Reckon both are gearing up for some big reveals with their respective next gen consoles.