Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

harrison25 — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:45:46 GMT

It makes you wonder... is Microsoft preparing to leave the gaming industry?

The xbox, in my opinion, was originally born out of Bill Gate's own boredom. millions of dollars were spent, most of which ultimately undermined PC gaming by bringing excellent online multiplayer to consoles.

Since then, Bill has left the company to become an even greater philanthropist in the interest of saving his own soul...

Since microsoft has expressed no interest thus far in portable gaming, and since microsoft is rapidly allowing all star game developers to slip through their fingers, one thing stands out to me...

No one at microsoft any longer cares about the console game industry. With bill gone, nobody knows why they started, and with vista profits skyrocketing, the company must be wondering why they ever started in the first place...

the Xbox is like Iraq. It was fun, but eventually people just got bored of it, and the billions of dollars lost in the venture makes us wish we had some kind of time machine to right things.

Microsoft doesn't need to branch out in this direction, and as stated earlier, they've only undermined their own operating system by making console gaming more pc gamer friendly.

I loved my xbox, I love my 360, but when microsoft let Bungie go, while still retaining the rights to the halo franchise, it screams to me that microsoft forsees a day when halo 5 releases on the ps4 because the xbox 720 was never made....

then all they have to do is sit back and let the royalties pile in. No more bad publicity for the company over their japanese image, over the hardware failures, just Windows and Halo 3 royalties, the two things microsoft knows it will make millions off of, entirely risk free.

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

SpaceShot — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:18:33 GMT

These are all good points, but don't forget the counterpoint.

What MSFT has done with Bungie is keep the people of the studio intact. if you were Bungie, you would want to keep a larger share of the pie, too. If you were Bungie, you would want to work on something... anything other than Halo 4. If you were MSFT, you want more Halo games. This was doomed to be a nasty split.

In the past, the solution was to force the studio to do something... and the result? The people that _really_ make the studio click leave and start another studio.

There's no talk of mass departures from Bungie today. And while there will likely be a Halo 4, I suspect the story guys at Bungie will get input on how to proceed with their beloved IP and an up and coming development house will be handed the reins (think SW:KOTOR and SW:KOTOR II). If anything, this is a creative way to save what should have been an exodus of the talent that made Bungie what it is.

As far as losing the PGR series goes, I can't explain this one on a corporate level. On a personal level, I have lost interest in the PGR series (and gained interest in the Forza series) after this latest iteration. The PGR series moves further and further away from being about Kudos and more about racing. Well, if it's going to be about racing, I'll play Forza... so I already made the decision not to buy PGR4.

And Mass Effect? Well, this smacks to me more of a decision by Bioware recognizing their best days may really be behind them. Bioware was practically a household name among gamers for Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, and they scored big with SW:KOTOR. However, they handed off KOTOR:II work. And while Mass Effect looks fantastic, PC gamers are still playing NWN instead of upgrading to NWN2. Why? Well, why not? After many years to build up a community base of scripting and tools to run games, who wants to start over on all of that for what was a minimal upgrade? The graphics may have been a visual leap but the game engine (and these _are_ D&Ders, who are used to playing with a large dose of imagination) is not changed much.

Bioware seems to have smartly realized they will probably never have a higher value as a company again. Unfortunately, they chose poorly. While EA can't ruin Mass Effect, their yearly artificial "shutdown" of multiplayer play for perfectly good games has guaranteed a boycott from me for future Bioware efforts.

Look, you're right that something is up. MSFT's incredible lineup of 2007 games, coming out of its own publishing arm, is one for the record books. The concern now has to be, what happens in 2008? I hope they have an answer.

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

bcRIPster — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:05:01 GMT

On the comment about Rare, not only do I suspect you're right on the mark, I pretty much predicted this when the original purchase was announced back in 2002 in an article posted at the site I maintain (<a href="http://www.gamezero.com/gamezero/archived_news/20020924.html">gamezero.com</a>). Look in the news archive from September 24, 2002.

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

bcRIPster — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:06:19 GMT

Ugh, that link was posted broken here it is again:

http://www.gamezero.com/gamezero/archived_news/20020924.html

sorry :)

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

solomonrex — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:42:55 GMT

I think it's somewhat unfair to MS here.

Nintendo basically re-treads a lot of IP from their golden age - it's hard to screw that up.

Sony had a horrible run on ps1 - they crash was bad, they got lucky with GT. Squaresoft and EA made that console.

Sony's run on ps2, on the other hand, has been amazing. Jak & Dexter, Ratchet & Clank, Sly, etc. They've been able to keep their sports games despite EA.

So MS is doing well. They haven't kept at it, but they've done so well with 3rd party publishers, they probably don't need to develop a lot on their own. They have enough money to keep the 3rd party's going. I'm a little concerned as to why EA favored the ps3 over 360. Why they would do that when Sony is a bigger competitor is troubling.

Their problem is persistence. Crash developed into Jak, etc. MS abandoned all of their special exclusives instead of improving and promoting them into stars: Jet Set Radio, Crimson Skies, OddWorld, KOTR, Mechwarrior. Some of them were MS's, some of them others, but they were all unique and they all went away. MS makes it too hard to be a fan sometimes.

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

Thomas Alan — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:58:41 GMT

solomonrex:

If retreading games from a golden era were so easy, Sega wouldn't be having the difficulties that it's going through today. Here's hoping for NiGHTS 2.

You've gotta shake your head at the whole Rare debacle though. They went from standing on par with Nintendo on its own platform for a generation, to an afterthought in the space of just such a short period of time.

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

CyberSkull — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:48:24 GMT

Dugg it: http://digg.com/gaming_news/As_Devs_Flee_the_MS_Hive_What_Does_This_Mean_For_Microsoft_Game_Studios

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

mandrake — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:14:57 GMT

I disagree that there's anything fundamentally wrong with Shane Kim's current strategy for securing exclusive content for the 360. True, mistakes have been made, and the failure to lock down exclusivity for the entire Mass Effect trilogy is a particularly glaring example. But I don't believe these point to a systemic flaw in the gameplan. None of the problems you pointed out cannot be solved by properly and carefully negotiating and structuring the exclusive development/publishing agreements between MS and third parties. These contracts, if properly drafted, will remain binding regardless of who ends up owning the third party studio in the future. Besides, what alternative would you propose? MS can't go back to the regime of in-house development that Ed Fries put in place, because it hasn't worked and likely won't ever work for them. That's why I don't believe, as you do, that money was the primary factor that deterred MS from buying Bioware/Pandemic. Rather, I think it was because MS now understands and accepts that its internal corporate culture is simply incompatible with cultivating the peculiar atmosphere and conditions that game developers require to remain creative and productive. Since changing its corporate culture may neither be desirable nor advantageous, MS adopted a new approach to managing its relationships with creative talent. I'll bet that's the biggest reason MS let Bungie go so easily. I don't think you're giving them enough credit for that.

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

GreenTea — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:03:06 GMT

Very interesting article. Personally, I can't wait for this Microsoft control on these publishers (and computer gaming) to end. Regardless of the lip service that the folks at Microsoft gave for PC gaming (with their Games for Windows initiative), it's become quite clear over the past few years that Microsoft and the other big publishing houses see PC gaming as an ancillary market to the consoles. The other three aren't beholden to PC gaming per se, but Microsoft is suffering immensely from its gaming division wanting more XBOX sales, and their OS division demanding PC gamers to upgrade to Vista for DirectX 10. You can't expect that to happen if you don't nurture game developers to develop primarily for DirectX 10, and trickle down to the consoles. What have we gotten from Microsoft? Titles such as the Halo series or Jade Empire which have shipped for the PC well past their prime on the consoles. It's no wonder that PC gamers like myself, which initially gave Microsoft and the other deveopers their success, now feel like we've been stood up on prom night. Sure, they like to say that piracy on the PC is one of the major factors, but everyone inside and outside the industry knows that's a convenient excuse.

Since Microsoft won't do it for Vista, we need hardware gaming companies like ATI and NVidia to start co-publishing games with major developers. Then maybe I'll have a reason to upgrade to that new DirectX 10 card after all.

re: Flight of the Killer B's: As Bizarre, Bungie and BioWare Flee the Redmond Hive, What Does This Mean For Microsoft Game Studios?

wiyum — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:59:02 GMT

While all of these points are well taken, I think there's one part of the puzzle that is missing from this equation... All three of these studios are entities that Microsoft was counting on for the Fall/Winter period of 2007. In the next eighteen months, Microsoft expected nothing from any of these studios apart from DLC for both Halo 3 and PGR4... DLC that it will still receive.

In that context, MGS has plenty of time to recover. For one, it seems that Bungie genuinely has no plans to work outside of MS for its next few projects. If Bizzarre had any plans with MGS beyond PGR4, they were certainly unannounced, and not expected for at least 12 months. Bioware has certainly committed to finishing the Mass Effect Trilogy, and while this was previously an Xbox 360 exclusive and will likely now be multiplatform, I think it would be ludicrous to believe that it would have been coming anytime soon. The result? All three of these hurt Microsoft, but they not only have no effect on this all-important holiday season, they also have no bearing on whatever Microsoft's strategy was for the next year/year-and-a-half.

This means that Microsoft still gets the possibly-Playstation3-crushing holiday in 2007 that they had planned, and they still maintain their 2008 plans as well. Beyond that, they likely have some things to work out, but they have time to handle that. Lionhead is still hard at work on the next Fable. Ensemble is still hard at work on Halo Wars. Lost Odyssey, Alan Wake, Ninja Gaiden 2, and Too Human are all on their way. Microsoft not only has one of the most amazing holiday lineups ever with 2007, they also have the makings for a terrific 2008. With their money, and with the sure-to-grow-this holiday userbase, I don't expect them to have any trouble building a roadmap beyond that. Will it be the same roadmap they had planned? Likely not (though how big a part Bizarre and Boware played in that roadmap is anyone's guess), but I imagine it'll be a pretty strong plan all the same. All of this hurts, but because it doesn't affect holiday 2007, and because all three of these studios had big releases for this holiday and likely hadn't put too much into future projects, it doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as some seem to think.

That's how I see it anyway.