No kidding, best series ever!

Well,
There goes Age of Empires 4 and 5, unless the new company continues the series.

why would they do that

because M$ are greedy idiots.

I have worked with both Sony and MS as publishers.  I've never worked directly with Nintendo.

I can say that Sony likes to give its 1st party teams the leeway to operate as they always have -- they bought them *because* they were good at what they did, and they don't fix what's not broken.

MS, on the other hand, prefers to muscle its 1st party (and 2nd party, actually) studios into being clones of MS' internal development style.  This can be pretty disruptive for game developers, who often are not used to thriving in a corporate atmosphere.  This might partly explain why they close, or let go, of 1st party studios fairly frequently.

This move doesn't surprise me in the slightest, even though Ensemble was, as I recall, originally formed by former MS employees.

This could have a very positive effect on the Xbox 360. Ensemble contributes almost nothing to the console, and their only real 360 asset (Halo Wars) is still coming out. If the new studio and the devs going to other internal studios build better games for the 360 it will have been a successful move for Microsoft.

But I still hate it. Age of Empires.....dear god....

This is the first time I really want to hear an interview with a guy from Microsoft stating why they did that and waht this means for their gaming business.

Well, I suppose Microsoft has to afford to pay for timed-exclusives somehow...

11 years after it's creation AoE is still a great game to play, to think a studio with that much talent is going to close is very sad.

Microsoft can afford to waste billions of dollars on a console and it closes one of it's most successful and well loved studios for financial reasons - does this make sense to anyone?

microsoft still owns the rights to age of empires and has plenty of talent... so i dont see why they couldnt make more of them.