You'll take that fancy nobleman's vest from my cold, dead hands sir.

I am the pimp of albion!

I thought I was pimp when I married a Rifle Vendor thinking I would get some cheap weapons.  The bitch still charges out the ass(I get like a 9% love discount) and she changes vending types everytime I see her.

That kotor mmo hasn't been announced pc exclusive, it probably will but its not atm.

I don't know if anyone else said it, but Bioware was owned by holding group who sold all their gaming assets to EA... it's likely that Microsoft Game Studio couldn't have gotten the approval from higher up to get that kind of money. I don't have the time to read all of it, but you shouldn't post these kind of post if you don't really understand the underling workings that led to them.

That's a lot of unnannounced games that we probably won't even see for at least a year, let alone get wind of a release date.

These studios just don't pump out games that fast.  It's taking Bungie two years to make a friggin' expansion.  Any new IP won't be released for at the very least a year and half after that.

Rare is the only studio that I could see pumping out games in a reasonable amount of time.  Turn 10 as well, to a lesser extent.  Rare are kind've like Insomniac in that regard.

Guys, the main point of this thread was to point out that MS tends to focus on third party titles rather than first and second party titles.  So long as the games keep coming, is there anything wrong with that?

EA treated studios like crap in the 90s.  Buying studios isn't much of a risk so long as the studio is great, they don't mind being bought, and you treat them well after the acquisition.

The talent didn't walk out after Sony bought Naughty Dog or Zipper, or after Microsoft bought Ensemble or Bungie, did it?

Those gaming assets were BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios.  I'm well aware of what went down back in 2007.

MS could've easily stepped in (you know they knew about the merger before hand) and asked for either one of the two studios, thoguh I agree taht they would've never been approved to pick up both.

And that doesn't explain away the Bizarre situation, nor the closing of internal studios.

This sums it up nicely.

Certain posters on here are making a big deal out of a very fine point.

But the risk is high. Bungie eventually walked out the door and some of sony's investments didn't pan out neither. The former Psygnosis has been reduced to a F1 yearly game farm (let's see, now that sony lost the licesense they might be given some leeway to try new things) and the teams behind the getaway and eight days... well you know the story. The point is that you don't need to treat them like crap to drown the potential creativity and innovation from a studio and that's why dumping massive dollars into buying teams is a risky strategy. Owning a large farm of first party teams is not the only option and not necessarily the best option to build that bunch of head-turning exclusives a console needs.

Microsoft's strategy of funding cherrypicked projects has the same potential of producing great games for its userbase but without the huge sunk costs that come with a team buyout. Mind you, this also has it's own slew of risks but the whole "omgomgomg microsoft has no first party lolololol" is just a fruitless discussion born only from the desire to bash whatever microsoft does. It's SDF at its best.

Actually dude, Bungie just started working this Spring on the expansion.