Links and Amped dev sold to Take Two

[Farid]

Yes, I know that. I would like to know how basically everyone else manages to keep these things on the sly. If there's a reason, I'll hear it. Till then, though, I have no good reason to suspect that the unannounced projects of other companies are greater than those of MGS.

The reason is simple, as Azbat pointed out, Microsoft was new on the market, they had to produce a lot of games, and advertise them very early in their developements, all that in order to, first create hype, buzz around the Xbox and secondly they had to reassure the gamers that the Xbox was going to have a lot of games, of all kind.
Once the Xbox sold enough, and once it had the support of a lot of third party publishers, and once they had a global vision of their market, MGS took some decisions accordingly. One of thoses decisions was to reduce, i must say drastically, the number of their internal projects.

Seeing that they "hyped" some of those projects, because of the previously mentioned reasons, thoses cancelations didn't go unnoticed like it would with any other big developer.

But to be honest, some of the early choices made by MGS, and especially thoses made by Ed Fries, were, let's say, questionable that's true.
On the other hand the choices made by MGS today are perfectly understandable and, more than this, they're good for the whole Xbox business, in my opinion.

BTW, canceling a project and selling a developer house and its IPs is not the same thing. One is indeed a bad move for MGS image(Although, judging by the actual market, almost all developers are in no position to give MS attitude if they propose them to fund a project), the other is just a business transaction between two publishers.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

As for why Kingdom Under Fire and Outrun 2? Japanese developer relations. MS doesn't want to lose what little Japanese developer support they have with From Software and Sega. They probably didn't pay much and figured they'd sell 100,000 copies each over the next year or so, mostly at the $20 price point.

Kingdom Under Fire = Korean

Oops. I meant Phantagram and Asian developer relations.

 

[jarrod]

Microsoft is setting their goals bigger as a publisher. No more mid range products and they've phased out sports entirely... now they'll focus on marquee games like Halo or Rare software.

Yep. Again, who wants to work for them now? MS is basically saying that if you don't have a blockbuster game, forget it. And how many developers can promise that? Not even UC2 met that criteria.

Not every game needs to be a blockbuster, that's what Rare, Bioware and Bungie games are for. Microsoft will sorround them with strong secondary releases like Fable, PGR, Crimson Skies, Age of Empires, MechAssault and so on. They want to be more like Nintendo, with holiday blockbusters and solid filler brands.

 

[Farid]

They want to be more like Nintendo, with holiday blockbusters and solid filler brands.

You mean they want to cannibalize their own market, and therefore alienate any form of third party support?

 

[Johnny Awesome]

No.

 

[Qroach]

You mean they want to cannibalize their own market, and therefore alienate any form of third party support?

lol who knows