I don't see any efforts from MSFT side on this, care to enlighten me?
Anyhow, I think your point above is exactly the generalization and mischaracterization I was addressing. When you say:
MSFT doesn't have any studio that craves technical excellence for their platform
I think you just haven't even bothered to try their software. Take Forza Motorsport 3. It runs at a rock solid 60Hz at 720p with 2xMSAA. How many games can claim this? It has 24 environments and over 100 courses out of the box and 400 cars full modeled inside and out. Cars can be customized with hundreds of specialty parts and individually tuned.
On the technical side the game has excellent physics--but has also been designed to have very accessible (everything from single button racing and rewind--my son can beat the easy AI with single button racing--all the way up to unforgiving realistic driving models with no assists). That isn't only technical excellence but that takes a lot of vision to design the game to scale upward and downward to player skill. Essentially FM3 can be driven like an arcadish racer to a full blown sim, your choice.
In terms of technology it is designed to allow nearly unlimited rewind, replay saves/editing/uploads, photomodes, etc. Cars are not just customizable (spoilers, new rims, etc) but you can paint the entire car however you want.
Which then gets into the storefront: You can buy, sell, and gift car designs. You can rate user contributions, etc. You can also buy/rate tune jobs, design elements, photos, user videos, etc.
Most of you wouldn't consider this as part of the "
technically excellence" category of a game--but that is because most of you don't don't consider an engine anything but a
renderer.
It really comes down to investment of resources. Just looking at the online options (over 100 variables to make custom matches) where you can change scoring conditions, groupings and car selections, delays, and various penalties it is pretty clear that there has been a "technical investment" not seen in other games of the genre.
I could go on, but it is pretty obvious your blanket statement is born out of ignorance of the "technical excellence" of MS's titles. Unless of course we are limiting "technical excellence" to the renderer.
This same story applies to Halo 3. The renderer and animation blah blah blah Bugnie/MS are lazy and don't invest technically in their title. Yet their matchmaking, level editor, sharing tools, Bungie.net, theater, custom game editor, 4 player coop, 4 player MP splitscreen on/offline, etc are trivial investments that speak nothing of "technical excellence."
If this stuff was so easy we would see a ton of titles with these features standard. They are popular features among consumers, so the question is if they are so easy and of no technical issue why aren't the "technically excellent" developers throwing in 4 player coop for just the heck of it. Full gameplay replay of your campaign and MP matches with movie controls? Child's play. Allowing users to change MP rules and scoring, gun damange, health systems, etc? Yeah, we can toss it in and work at the end of the project.
This is what I'm talking about, MSFT only concern now is profitability and it can be achieved with multi-platforms rather easily.
Replace MSFT with "Every company in the world" and that would be a fair quote. But if we are trying to say "only" concern that is palpably false of any company. MS, like Sony and Nintendo, have a number of objectives and concerns that fall under the general umbrella of success.
Technical excellence has no meaning these days from the sales point of view, be it MSFT or SNE or anybody else.
But SNE uses their internal studios to make some unique selling point: exclusive games of unmatched quality, and "bad architecture" is really helping here.
And MSFT (and whoever) doesn't try to make unique selling points in their exclusive software?
