But I was good for AoE IV (Victorian Age?) plus expansions. And now that RoN games have died, what does that leave us with?

(Hmm. Website go bye-bye for a little while. Most odd.)

Hopefully the regroup will lead them back to making good games.

“Unfortunately, our decision to close Ensemble will adversely impact many of the studio’s team members. Following the closure, the Ensemble leadership team will form a new entity and have agreed to partner with Microsoft to develop future products and provide support for Halo Wars post launch. While the new company will be hiring a portion of the Ensemble employees, its size and resources prevent it from offering positions to the entire Ensemble team. We hope to integrate much of this creative talent into MGS or the broader IEB team, where we have relevant openings.”

To my ears this sounds like regular down-sizing (sorry, re-organization), perhaps with a hint of “we think some of the people at Ensemble are and this is the best way to get rid of them.” I’m sure Phil et al will see plenty of synergistic effects appearing out of the vapours of this newly disintegrated studio.

Switching from sarcasm: Anyone else got a chuckle from reading Metal Gear every time it said MGS in that mail?

I am a big fan of Big Huge Games but Rise of Legends bombed harder than anything Ensemble ever did. And wasn’t Big Huge’s latest release the expansion pack for Age of Empires III?

Microsoft doesn’t realize things, Microsoft gets beaten to a pulp, threatened, sued and forced into doing things. And they always fail in the long run.

I have heard a quote from one of the MS suits involved in this decision to the effect of “PC games aren’t lucrative and RTS games on consoles aren’t lucrative”.

If there’s any truth to that: then I wonder why Microsoft doesn’t seem to realize that the main reason why a lot of their non-business customers stick with Windows as their OS, is because of gaming.

Without new, high quality game titles, there’s far less incentive for them to keep using Windows as their OS of choice. They can go buy a Mac and use OSX instead, or switch to Linux.

And Windows is still a far greater cash cow for Microsoft, than anything else they produce (other than Office). In fact, it’s their Windows and Office profits that are helping to subsidize all their Xbox efforts.