MS closing Ensemble (AoE, Halo Wars)

I think the closure of Ensemble isn't a sign of Microsoft totally shying away from internal games development. Instead they appear to only invest where they feey feel there's either a lot of money on the table or where they need to fix holes in their console line-up. That is a little bit cynical, but it perhaps makes more sense for a platform holder than a more nonfocused strategy of just having big internal resources. For all the praise Sony is getting for their first party strategy, here we are 22 months after PS3 launch and there hasn't really been a game that would be a huge breakaway success (either commercially or critically).

Ensemble is (was) of course a very good studio that was always profitable with a very successful IP, but Microsoft probably think they don't need a RTS studio. Halo Wars might be a solid game, but it won't make the genre suddenly huge, because even on PC it has its hardcore fans, but doesn't seem to have much audience outside of it.

In similar way, Microsoft had a much bigger number of studios back in Xbox 1 days, but it didn't make a slightest difference. Right now each of their studios seems to be focused on very specific market and in future they'll be opening/acquiring new studios with that in mind, rather than growing for the sake of growing.

 

A couple of problems with this line or reasoning.

1) What consitutes a breakaway success? Very few games manage the large multiples of millions of units sold. I don't think the internal studios should be expected to turn out mega-million sellers to any large degree, just a few per generation. They ought to be aiming for good profits from a business POV.

2) Does a studio have to achieve massive sales if it manages to achieve interest in the console and sell boxes? Singstar has sold something like half a million so far on PS3 according to VGChartz. That's not an incredible performance by any stretch, but how many of those PS3 owners wouldn't have bought a PS3 if Singstar wasn't available? If you look at Sony's previous generation efforts, they aren't richly populated with 1st party mega successes. GT, Crash and Spyro topped PS1 with subsequent success selling < 3 million. And Crash and Spyro were from independents back then too! PS2 is similar, with GT heading the list, a few mish-mashed IPs selling > 3 million, but the majority of first-party titles sold less than 2 million, less even that 1 million. When you factor in the long-term intall base of PS2, the relative first-party successes are actually pretty small pieces of the pie.

The value of the first party can't lie in just creating monster gamers like Halo or Mario or GT. Product differentiation is a huge part of it. If your library is pretty much the same as anyone else's, then you'll need to differentiate yourself on other points, such as price and services, which seems to be where MS are headed. "Our game library is pretty much identical to PS3's, because it's made up of cross-platform titles. Let's stop wasting time creating 3% of the library as unique titles. Let's invest on those games with big returns, and put the rest of the budget into marketing and pushing our hardware as the best value platform to play these games."

 

Your notion that games that fail to create buzz around themselves still have ability to create buzz around a platform they are available on sounds crazy to me. Your example of Singstar PS3 is flawed as you don't have any hard data and throw a rhetoric question instead. As for PSX and PS2, well, their success has always been atributed to extremely strong 3rd party support rather than Sony's internal development.
Wii is a perfect example of platform which gained popularity thanks to 1st party software and I can almost certainly tell you that these "mega-million sellers" like Wii Fit or Mario Kart Wii contributed way, way more to Wii's success rather than games that were interesting but didn't succeed in attracting bigger audience like Batallion Wars.

If we agree that 1st party publishers' goal is to draw as many people to their platform as possible, then the most natural measure of a 1st party publisher's performance would be naturally sales of their games relatively to 3rd party publishers on that platform, wouldn't it?*
Because if someone comes out of a store with a PS3 and Call of Duty, am I led to believe that he bought the console for its "unique 1st party line-up"?

*that doesn't mean Microsoft's ratio is better than Sony's. I am only expressing my doubt that Sony is the right model to follow for Microsoft, despite the praise it gets here, because we don't have any evidence Sony's 1st party model "the more the better" is more successful than Microsoft's.

 

If you have two consoles both offering the highly popular Urban Massacre 3 computer game that is going to go on to sell 10 million units across the two platforms, and a pundit Joe Bloggs who wants to buy one of these consoles, what's the differentiating factor? Why do they choose Console A over Console B or vice versa? If the software libraries are exactly the same, then the library has no impact. But if Console A also offers the unique title Squirmy Squigglers which only 200k people in the world want to play, but they all want to play Urban Massacre 3 too, which platform are they likely to buy to play Urban Massacre 3? And if the other Console A exclusive Bright Shiny Ghost Warlord Super Wrestling Pro, another niche title with an interest base of 300k, also appeals to Urban Massacre fans, won't that be another 300k buyers who are less interested in buying Console B to get their Urban Massacre fix? And when it's also announced Console A offers Karaoke Nightmares that 400k girlfriends are keen to play, won't that encourage the Urban Massacre players to choose Console A as a solution to both theirs and theirs GF's entertainment interests?

You're right, PS 1 and 2's success is largely based on the 3rd party exclusives. If in this gen there are negligable 3rd party exclusives, won't a sizeable number of first party exclusives be the deciding factor for a reasonable contingent of buyers? I would say the measure of 1st party exclusives hardware pulling power is total number of 1st party exclusives titles sold, though the ratio of titles to 'deciding factor to buy this console' I couldn't guess at.

 

Maybe Microsoft are content with giving pundit Joe Bloggs a significant price difference and parity/superiority in multiplatform titles. And the invisible advantage of being favored by the developers.

Guitar Hero and the $149 price point did more for the last three years of the Playstation 2 than both God of War's.

 

Well that's what they're saying!

 

I agree with you. The problem I see is that neither strategy seems to be terribly successful. I still question the wisdom of closing Ensemble though. What about Nintendo's strategy though? They also depend heavily on first-party studios and it seems to pay off.

 

Why are you discussing hypothetical consoles and scenarios that have no relevance to this discussion? It's not like Sony has gazillion of games covering every niche and Microsoft has zero exclusive games. They both have karaoke games (or will have in the near future), they both have racing games etc. And Microsoft isn't going to stop releasing games. The situation is that growing 1st party development led Sony situation to the point where they have 3 first person shooters over the next 5 months. Unlike your ideal scenario, they will have to compete (in a way) against each other and they are not complimentary to 3rd party games, they are going to compete against Call of Duty etc. Is more better in this case? Will Sony be able to give each of them enough exposure and marketing money that each of these releases is meaningful for the console? Or is it better to have just one shooter (Gears of War 2 on Microsoft's side) and advertise the hell out of it and hope it takes off in a big way?
We'll see in the next few months. Both approaches involve huge risks and it's hard to tell which is right at this point. But constantly praising one and dissing the other doesn't seem justified to me.

I also think that Ensemble was a precious asset, a very experienced RTS developer. It seemed that the studio was safe as long as Shane Kim was a head of Microsoft Games Studios, but it for some reason didn't fit with Phil Spencer's vision of the company, so he closed it.

As for Nintendo, they definitely rely on internal development, but they seem to really carefully position each new game these days and don't exactly flood market with many new games. And they have the easiest way of the three to do so!

 

No relevance? They're supposed to be illustraing the advantage of 1st party developers, that they're not just about making money on the games sold and don't have to be huge sellers to be worthwhile.

Case in point. Why are MS wasting their money developing a karaoke game if it's not going to sell several million and make them lots of cash?

 

I agree with general notion that 1st party developers should try to make games that reach audiences that don't the console, pave the way for 3rd party publishers in some cases etc. But games like this shouldn't be just thrown on the market, they have to be put with very intense marketing to make any difference.

Microsoft believes otherwise
http://www.videogaming247.com/2008/...ft-noble-in-reponse-to-hd-victory/#more-10963

 

Games like GEars of War, Mass Effect and Bioshock are probabl the top 3 examples I see of basically homerun exlcusives, acquired by MS through various tactics. In the case of Gears and ME, it was due to strong relationships with the developers, and the financial incentives of having MS publish and advertise their game.

In Bioshock's case, it was probably mainly due to the fact that the PS3 just was a little later in coming to market, so this one is a little bit of good fortune. But, if MS launches first next time around, and continues to have great development tools, I see no reason to believe there wouldn't me similar scenarios.

Don't we all know this story by now? The head designers at Bungie would've quit had they not been bought out, they played hardball with MS, they really weren't offered much choice. You can control the company, but you can't control the people in the company.

I'm pretty sure that if it was totally up to MS, Bungie would still be a wholly owned subsidiary

 

Why would this be the role of 1st party titles? It seems to me that 1st party titles if anything should be built for mass appeal, in order to sell their console. Big budget, big markteting, big sales.

If you want to develop a niche game, or something totally innovative, isn't that best left to smaller developers, who can target 4 or 5 different consoles at the same time?

 

Do we have a source for that? I was able to find tons of speculation, but nothing too hard. Hell, you can find stories that say that Bungie was unhappy with how things were going, but nothing that confirms them either. Going into the realm of speculation myself, I just figure that if the Marathon/Myth IP belonged to Bungie, Microsoft might actually have leverage over them; would they be as willing to break up the company if it meant they lost pet IP?

 

The key for Nintendo is they are dependent on one large studio, which is working on so many projects it's easy to move manpower around as projects grow and shrink. This also helps inoculate new employees with The Nintendo Way so they maintain that house style (Wii Sports is a good example of this, giving five promising but inexperienced lead designers small games to work on). I've always felt Nintendo took the wrong lesson from the early failures of Retro, which has prevented them from building either Retro or NST up enough to develop that culture and economy of scale.

 

Forgive me for spewing forth ethnic stereotypes, but I think something like what Bungie would be a very un-Japanese thing to do.

 

As I said, as a differentiation between your platform and the others. If two consoles offer exactly the same libraries, choice comes down to other factors. If one has exclusive games you want to play, you're far more likely to buy that console. Yes, earning loads of cash is of course a big plus! But 1st party offers the chance to create titles to appeal to a particular market sector and attract them to your box, which they may otherwise ignore. If you leave that to 3rd parties, you have to hope they'll gamble on a 'niche title' and if they go multiplatform, you're no better off than the competition once again and can't differentiate by library.

That's only one way to use 1st parties though. The other way is to take the library as it is, expecting the cross-platform situation to be fairly even as makes no difference, with 3rd parties providing the 'something for everyone' library for your box, and use the first parties just to make shed-loads of cash with major mainstream games. This looks to be MS's strategy. My point was only that that isn't the only use of 1st parties.

 

What's great about Nintendo is that they almost seem to create games first, and adjust their next iteration of hardware to what they want to do with the software. That's definitely the best way to do it, I think.

 

it's too bad first party devs under the Microsoft umbrella are closing.

 

Could you please clarify what you mean by this sentence?