MS has made great games going back almost 2 decades when you consider the PC market. Focusing more on consoles since that is their bread and butter, they had some phenomenal Xbox games and brought us a lot of great stuff on 360. I don't mind their shift towards XBLA with some of their games, many of them would not have made a lick of sense being a $60 retail title and I think that's something Nintendo and MS have learned this gen that Sony has not. Going forward into next gen we'll obviously see a splurge of new IP's that you always see on every new console. I secretly hope they bring back a sports division. RalliSport Challenge and Links were amazing last gen, and their NBA and NHL games were showing great promise. It seemed once they got EA on board with XBL on Xbox, they saw no reason to compete.

Who the hell cares how Rare is seen by the minority geek-online-only-community?!

Rare has done a great job this gen. Period. I bought 4 Rare games this gen and 2 of them were good and 2 were very good.

they are on the right path for me atleast. the only thing i need to seal the deal is the 720 announcement going smoothly

Probably because when you put the game into your 360 Microsoft Game Studios pops up along with Epic. 

If the previous two generations are anything to go buy they will start off strong in the first party development. My question is if they will keep it up through out a console's life cycle like Sony has done or just quite making new IP's in the middle of the generation?

Well they have a lot of new studio's making new IP core games for the next gen. So I'm looking forward to it.

well overall good, but rare i hate it. all i want is a violent KI game. not a damn pinata. they didnt even do another Kameo, they are the capcom of the west in my opinion.

Hopefully, I'm starting to have my doubts about the next Xbox. Especially if they don't bring some diversity to their FP line-up shooters and racing are nice but RPG's and adventure games are just as good if not better in most cases. After May 21st and E3 I will decide on which console to get, although I plan on getting both eventually. 

They published it for Epic.

Microsoft Game Studios/ Microsoft Studios has been the publisher for all 4 Gears of War games.

Have they actually released a game by themselves for the most part they just publish games the actual developers are other studios like Turn 10, Mistwalker, Epic, Remedy etc. etc.  So I guess they are a good publisher.  Just like 20th Century Fox is curently a good distributor of Dreamworks Animation movies.