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Microsoft: We still own Age of Empires News
PC News by Tom Bramwell
Microsoft may have announced plans yesterday to shut down Ensemble Studios when Halo Wars ships, but Age of Empires fans are told not to worry!
"I want to reassure you that Microsoft will still own the Age of Empires intellectual property," Games for Windows boss Kevin Unangst wrote on Gamerscoreblog overnight. So that's alright then.
"As a company, we're very excited about the future potential for Age of Empires, and as a PC gamer I'm looking forward to what that future holds. Stay tuned," he concluded.
Microsoft yesterday said its decision to close down Ensemble Studios, which it bought in 2001 on the strength of the PC Age of Empires series, was "a fiscally-rooted decision that keeps [Microsoft Game Studios] on its growth path".
The Xbox corporation said it would try and re-home as many jobless Ensemble veterans as possible and that the Dallas dev's "leadership team" would form a new studio to provide ongoing support for Halo Wars and work on other MGS titles.
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Comments: 1-20 of 20 in total
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The shutting down of developers is obviously a method of bringing down cost in the short term for the financial disaster that is the MS home entertainment or whatever it's called nowadays, division. But whether it is a smart move in the long term (provided they want to stay in the console business) remains to be seen.
It might be a further sign that MS isn't really commited to hardware as opposed to Sony and Nintendo. They need their own developers to make optimal use of the hardware and work as advertisements for the system while 360's proposition is much simpler: cheap PC on which you can play the exact same games you've always played (PS3 is too close to the 360 proposition for my liking to be honest. E.g. EyeToy should be much more leveraged). |
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farticusmaximus
11/09/08 @ 09:25
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"the financial disaster that is the MS home entertainment or whatever it's called nowadays, division"
You mean the games division that's been conistently making a profit in recent months? Money is made in console gaming these days. Ensemble are primarily a PC game developer. MS take the non-PC specific talent and lose the rest. Yes, it's a sad loss for PC gaming, but from a business point of view it makes perfect sense. |
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I think Les might be the missing Kim Il Sung, and he's trying to preach the "juche" (not so) subliminally. The weird thing is that Ensenble never did any 360 game yet, but still, this might be a sign that *something bad* (good) will happen, and PS3 will reign supreme. We might even be able to raise the Berlin wall again, who knows?
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autogunner
11/09/08 @ 09:48
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halo wars going to be delayed and shite then if the team knows they are fired the minute they finsih the game...
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I won't discuss it here but age of empires is a lowest common denominator rts. A kids version civ attached to a tactical sim where your empires army consists of around 10 units.
Utter nonsense. You're comparing it to an entirely different genre. Age of Empires 2, especially with the addon, was one of the best, most-balanced RTS games on the market, with a fairly complex resource system and a variety of equally valid strategies, from rushing to turtling to whatnot. Apart form that, your "no loss" comment was frighteningly idiotic anyhow, unless you can't see the difference between something that is genuinely bad, and something you personally don't like. Which is rather stupid in itself.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 11/09/08 @ 11:48
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Comments: 1-20 of 20 in total
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