Aces, another developer making games that don't sell on consoles.

So, what's left of Microsoft's Windows developers after Ensemble and Aces shut down?

MS is basically shutting the door to its PC studios. This shouldn't effect 360 game development or MS's current strategy.

I know a little something about the MS games division (of the past -- I'm not too keen on the modern day, but I don't think its changed much), and I can tell you that they overspend like you would not believe, relative to other games development groups.

The ACES team, as an example, would assign a single artist to polishing a single aircraft (or two) in a game, for an entire project, whereas competing simulators (of the day) would have 1 artist per ~4 game aircraft models, and those artists were expected to handle everything else, including the terrain, the HUD, and the game shell/interface. That may have changed over the years, but when I heard about that kind of spending, I was both *really* jealous (as in, I wished my dev team of the time could spend like that), and kind of appalled at how much more they were spending than the typical game developer.

Given their spending, I'm kind of shocked they never really managed to pull off more decent games.  They wrecked everything else they did 1st party, from MechWarrior 4, to Allegiance, to Outwars, to flight sims, IMO.   Although... the MechWarrior RTS and Age of Empires RTS games were pretty decent, and of course when they purchased great studios (Lionhead, Bungie, Ensemble, etc.) and took a hands-off approach, they got great stuff that way as well.

Given that history, I am not at all surprised to see them looking at doing every exclusive for the X360 from a 2nd-party, publisher-only perspective.  Use outside teams, and throw them away if they don't produce results.  They don't seem to be able to save money by doing quality projects internally, so it all makes sense, from that perspective.  Yes, that speaks pretty poorly about their internal management, but... that's what appears to be the issue, from what I've heard.  Managing games and managing the next revision of Microsoft office product XYZ are completely different ball games -- yet they tend to pull staff from other areas of MS, rather than hiring specifically for games development, again as I understand it, "so I hear" from ex-MS games employees, etc.

m$ will be eaten next generation, multiplatform will be a rule from now on unless the throw millions for each game.

Wtf, why did MS do this?

It's called focus and strategy.

Microsoft now has a games console and will keep that product line long given how they've finally learned how to make money with it.

They want to use all their development resources into the xbox ecosystem, and neither Ensemble nor Aces fit - they either made PC games or made games that don't sell on consoles.

The PC sim fans will weep tho.