Interesting and all, but weren't Bizarre always third party?

Good luck finding a publisher who doesn't do this sort of thing.

Of course they did, it's the tool to eliminating Gran Turismo, it's not like Sony is going to promote a bigger ad budget to Motorstorm 3 than GT5 or Nintendo more marketing behind Excite Truck over Mario Kart Wii.

• Ensemble
• FASA

These were good closures, their output was low, the content ranged from good (Halo Wars) to poor (Shadowrun) and the overhead high (300-400 employees), plus moving away from PC developers allows for more expansion into consoles.

• Bizarre
• Bungie

Hard to say a third party was driven away, Bizarre was simply bought out, so Activision weren't going to allow them to make exclusives anyway.

so basically he has a reason for PGR 1-4 undersold each time...

Pretty much every move MS has made with its first and second party studios recently has been correct move financially and strategically. MS has correctly deduced that controlling IP is more cost effective than creating IP.

Hmm, while all these developers leaving and/or being closed down won't affect Microsoft too much right now it could well come back to haunt them when they release their next console. Interesting times are ahead.

Correction they used Unreal Championship and MechAssault to sell Xbox Live.

I really don't see why he complained about the sales of the PGR Series each game sold at least a million I believe.

You can add ACES (MS Flight Simulator) to the list.

My pet theory is that Microsoft has decided that it doesn't need internal game development anymore. They think that they can get similar results by offering special deals to third party developers, reducing the risk to their own bottom line.

I guess we'll see how that works out for them in the end, but in the short term, they seem to be pissing off their fanbase.

Well, PGR4 was really under-advertise and coming out right before Halo 3 was pretty much make it a throw away title.

Racing games are dying genre this gen. Last gen, racing game were view as showpiece for console but now a day it's FPS that reign supreme. I am sure this point didn't fail on Microsoft so they were more keen to just concentrate on one titles and save all their bacon for their FPS masterpiece (halo3 btw). Even Forza 2 didn't get much of the advertisement in the US. The driving games are still going strong in Europe and probably the reason MS still invest in it. (Just as they do for JRPG for Japan region).

In anycase it's sad as PGR4 was a great game and deserve much more support from MS.

Seems like a stupid strategy to me. I prefer most 1st party games to 3rd party, unless its from konami, they have yet to let me down.