Nintendon't What Micro...soft?

Have you ever wished someone would chronicle Microsoft's entire 119 year console defects? Well, as they say in the business, "Her legs...went on for days."

Due to the major success of Microsoft's Ensemble Studios, Microsoft has decided to shut down operations upon the completion of Halo Wars.

The internal Microsoft game studios e-mail on the subject:

Today, we shared with our employees at Ensemble that we have plans to close the studio after Halo Wars RTM. Such a decision is never easy. Like any business, we’re accountable for making tradeoffs and the right level of investments that will drive profit and future growth. However, as we reviewed our first-party portfolio and where we need to invest and divest our resources to achieve our long-term strategies, it became clear to us that closing the studio and redeploying those resources to other more scalable ventures is the right thing for our business at this time.

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.

Ensemble Studios has produced many notable games over the years – including the Ages franchise – that have helped MGS become a leader in interactive entertainment. And now, Halo Wars is already proving to be a hit by people who have seen and played early versions of the game. The Ensemble team is committed to continuing its development, testing and support of Halo Wars through to the completion of halo wars. We're also working closely with the studio’s leaders to ensure a smooth launch of the game in early 2009 and continuing support thereafter. We will support the studio in every way possible as they work to deliver this highly anticipated game.

This action notwithstanding, I want to emphasize that the overall investment Microsoft is making in video game development is not diminished, and we will continue to bring in talent to work on titles and franchises where we'll see the most ROI. Our priority is to continue to nurture the creative freedom that allows us to successfully drive our business strategy forward. Meanwhile, we're launching some outstanding games over the next few months. We've just launched Too Human and Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, and soon we'll see many other games hit retail store shelves, including Scene It! 2, Fable 2, Gears of War 2, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Lips and, of course, Halo Wars.

I want to thank you for your hard work and focus as we head into the next few months and make this a blowout year for first-party games. Please be supportive and respectful of our Ensemble colleagues as they go through this tough time.

Phil

This is, obviously, great news for everyone.



On a lighter note, Microsoft should be selling a few more Xboxes, due to the latest price drops.

The arcade model is now $199.99 (down from $279.99).
The premium (60GB) model is now $299.99 (down from $349.99).
The elite is now $399.99 (down from 449.99).

This price drop officially makes the Xbox Arcade the cheapest of the current generation video game consoles, beating Nintendo's Wii console, which retails for $249.99. It will be interesting to see how this affects sales for all companies. My guess is it won't do much, considering Xbox 360 is nearing the end of its lifespan, and the fact that it just didn't sell all that well when it was still fresh.

And how is Sony reacting to the news? As Julie Han told Gamasutra.com:

"We're really confident that consumers are making choices driven by value," she says, "and we know PS3 offers that value across the board, with the built-in Blu-ray player the broadest and deepest software lineup in the industry, with LittleBigPlanet, Resistance 2, Motorstorm [Pacific Rift]... we're quite confident our holiday sales will be good...We try to stick to our strategy... we feel the PS3 offers the value at that price point. More than anything, you'll see with the 80-gigabyte announcement at E3 as well as with the recent 160 gig, consumers are telling you they want more storage for photos, music... new games are also getting quite a bit of pickup through PlayStation Network. There's also our new video download service that consumers are going to want to do. It's showing that we're moving in the right direction."