Dodece said:
What I find idiotic about these threads is the number of poster lambasting Microsoft for this, and yet when I look at their game collections I do not see a Xbox 360 in their list. Microsoft has to be more competitive to make their product succeed. Thus they have to make difficult financial decisions. Do you think it was easy for them to make this decision.
They knew Ensemble could make them a lot of money on the PC. However they need to focus on their console. Ensemble was probably not going to help them there, and the genre is not a good genre for consoles. So they had to dissolve the studio. Yes it is tragic, but for Microsoft it might also have been necessary.
The reality is this for all your griping you did fail to support Ensemble. You failed to support the gaming group of its parent company. When you fail to do that you make things like this happen all the more often. Were the 360 five million more units sold right now this would probably not have happened. Microsoft would not feel a pressing need to do this, and your favorite studio would have a future.
Not to say you still have no recourse. Does anyone remember the New Coke debacle. Now if you are really serious buy Microsoft's hardware. Order their latest game, and write Microsoft a letter about you wanting them to change their position. I guarantee you if enough people write in, and Microsoft sees decent reservations for Ensembles latest game they would feel compelled to change their position. You do have the power to change this if you really do care.
Which a great many members in this community do not. Many of them will say they do, but that did not get them into the retailer to buy the 360 to play the latest game from Ensemble. How were you going to support this developer if you were not going to do this in the first place. You should take this as a lesson this is what happens to studios when their fans do not support them. They get the axe.
You can sit in the corner and bitch, or you can try to do something about what is happening. Read those comments as a call for help there is still a few months left to save this studio. You can do that by opening your wallet and speaking out. Microsoft listens to money. Put your money where your mouth is, and make it known. That is how you get a company to change its mind.
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Ensemble single-handedly made MGS. AoE is what is what put M$ on the radar when it came to games and later led to the Xbox. If it wasn't for ES and their amazing success, there probably wouldn't be an Xbox brand. M$ owes a lot to ES and what they are doing is a bad move. Telling people that M$ has no money is like telling them the ocean is running out of water. Bill Gates is still the number one richest man in the world, and I assure you M$ as a company has more money than he does. They have billions of billions to spend.
Ensemble was the best studio they ever had and the AoE games were the best games put out by M$. Every gamer who can call themselves a gamer knows of Ensemble and they all respect them. All shutting them down will do is anger the gamers. I hope most of the leaders learn from this, tell M$ to fuck off and make a new studio with almost the same staff, make a successor to AoE, or an entirely new IP, and make it a runaway success. That should teach M$ not to fuck with their most talented developers.
@MysticD
I don't know what you've been reading or smoking, but the RTS genre is growing rather than shrinking. Mor people play RTS games now than ever before. I just logged into Battle.net to check the numbers, 82k people are play games on battle.net for Warcraft3. It's 9:30am and most people are at work or in school so that's a pretty big crowd. It goes up a drastic amount in the afternoon. This is just WC3, a game that came out in 2003. I can tell you that the RTS genre is far from dead.
