As part of the company's restructuring efforts, the studio responsible for bringing original video programming to the Xbox platform is going to close.

Microsoft has thrown in the towel on television. As part of the Redmond, Wash. company's round of job cuts, which will see 18,000 people laid off over the next year, Microsoft is shuttering the two-year-old Xbox Entertainment Studios to focus more exclusively on gaming.

The 200-person studio, located in Santa Monica, Calif., will be closed in the coming months, with employees staying onboard to finish projects currently in production. That includes "Halo: Nightfall," the digital feature planned for later this year, as well the Halo television series produced by Steven Spielberg. "Signal to Noise," the documentary series -- for which Microsoft paid to dig up the lost trove of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial video games for the Atari 2600 -- will also be seen to completion.

"Xbox will continue to support and deliver interactive sports content like 'NFL on Xbox,' and we will continue to enhance our entertainment offering on console by innovating the TV experience through the monthly console updates," Xbox head Phil Spencer said in a statement. "Additionally, our app partnerships with world-class content providers bringing entertainment, sports and TV content to Xbox customers around the world are not impacted by this organizational change."

Source: CNET

If it's to focus more on gaming then good now shut down all those Kinect Studios and build more studios like Black Tusk and 343 to make more core titles.

Already posted.

You'll have to find some different negative news as we've done this already: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=186953&page=1#22

Locking

If that's a mere change of focus, why lay off 18k people? Why not transfering them to game development? Unless they are not qualified to that, but in that case can we expect Microsoft to hire another 18k people to the gaming division (in order to counterbalance the ones that are going out)? Otherwise they are shrinking, not changing focus.