microsoft posts

A few days ago we reported that former Ensemble Studios team member Paul Bettner states during a lecture at GDC 2010 that part of the reason for the development studio's shutdown by Microsoft was, "that every single game we shipped took twice as long as we said it would take, and took twice as much to make it." He also said that lots of crunch time and low morale were also big reasons.

Now another former Ensemble team member, Ian Fischer, has responded to Bettner's comments on his blog site. Fischer, who worked as a game design for the studio, paints an entire different picture of Ensemble's situation. He disputes Bettner's view that there was low morale at the studio, saying that their employe retention rates, "were in the vicinity of 90 [percent]" He also disputes Bettner's game budget claims, saying that while each game did cost more to make, their work was "no costlier or less efficient than any other developer of our caliber during this period of operation." He also states that all of the games made by Ensemble were profitable for Microsoft.

So what does Fischer believe Microsoft decided to shut down Ensemble in 2009? He believes that the studio's many non-RTS game prototypes which were never developed into full games might be to blame. He states, "Had we decided to crank out RTS after RTS instead of chasing after the MMOs and FPSs and RPGs and RTS-differents we constantly had in prototype, I'm sure we would have been a more efficient studio that could have operated with zero crunch. "

In 2008, Microsoft announced their plans to shut down Ensemble Studios after March 2009. Fans of Ensemble's games, particularly the Age of Empires RTS series, were in shock. After all, the game were big sales hits, selling millions of copies. Why would Microsoft want to close down the studio behind all of that success?

Our sister site Joystiq attended a GDC 2010 lecture where that question may have been answered. Paul Bettner, a former manager for Ensemble, said that things at the developer were not all wine and roses. Indeed, he said morale at the studio was low when the developer was making what turned out to be their last game, the Xbox 360 RTS title Halo Wars. He stated, "The reality is that every single game we shipped took twice as long as we said it would take, and took twice as much to make it." Because of constant crunch time, he says that the quality of the games suffered and so did the people.

Earlier this month we reported on rumors, based on a job application, that the upcoming Xbox 360 fantasy RPG Fable 3 from developer Lionhead Games might also be coming to the PC. Microsoft's official response to the rumor ("We have nothing to announce at this time.") was not a confirmation but it was not a denial either. At GDC 2010, Lionhead's head man Peter Molyneux had a panel chat about the game and during the Q&A session the PC port rumor came up.

According to our sister site Joystiq, Molyneux is quoted as saying, "I love what's happening to the PC, and I would love to see the Fable franchise on the PC." He was apparently afraid to get more specific than that, saying that the game's publisher Microsoft had "PR police people ... with sniper rifles." Of course they do.

Cross platform play between PC and Xbox 360 games has been few and far between in the last few years, but is Microsoft getting ready to make that happen more frequently? Our sister site Engadget points over to a recent demo shown on YouTube where a simple casual platformer game is seen being played on a Windows Phone series 7 prototype phone, a PC and an Xbox 360. The demo states the game can be saved on one platform and then played again with the same saved data on either one of the other platforms.

While this demo is pretty impressive it's another thing entirely for game developers to get excited by this prospect. Again only a tiny amount of PC games have been made to play online with their Xbox 360 counterparts (Shadowrun, Lost Planet Colonies and Universe at War: Earth Assault) and that tech has been in place for about three years now.

Microsoft hasn't released a retail PC game since their port of the first Gears of War game in 2007. But are they planning to prep a PC port of Lionhead Studios' upcoming fantasy action-RPG Fable 3? A job description spotted by Kodugamer.com hints strongly that is indeed the case. While the actual job recruitment page has since been changed to "Unannounced Project" Kokugamer.com took a screenshot of the original page before it was altered.

As described, the job is for a network programmer who would port the network code for Fable 3 from the Xbox 360 and PC while also allowing both ports to work together. Cross-platform play between Xbox 360 and PC games is also something that hasn't been done recently.

The original Fable game was indeed released for the PC in 2005, a year after its release on the original Xbox game console. However Fable 2, released for the Xbox 360 in 2008, was not ported over to the PC. Fable 3, where you play the son or daughter of your character from Fable 2, is scheduled for a fall 2010 release for the Xbox 360. We have emailed Microsoft for comment about this new development.

[Thanks Mikko]

Update: Big Download has received Microsoft' official comment on this story: "We have nothing to announce at this time."

The MMO game space just got a new developer/publisher today with the official announcement of En Masse Entertainment. Based in Seattle the company is a subsidiary of South Korean-based publisher Bluehole Studio and are planning to bring Bluehole's fantasy themed MMO game Tera to North America and Europe.

En Masse's co-founders include Patrick Wyatt as its Chief Operating Officer. Wyatt had previously co-founded ArenaNet and helped to launch their title Guild Wars. Another co-founder is Senior Producer Brian Knox who previously worked as Producer for NCsoft's latest MMO launch Aion.

As far as Tera itself, it's described as a game with lots of player-controlled action in "a world where six races try to work together for the common good." It's scheduled to launch in Korea later this year but no definitive launch date has been announced for the US and Europe. The game's official web site has already launched with lots of video and screenshots from the game.

PC gamers were nearly universal in slamming Microsoft's decision to cancel previously announced plans to bring Alan Wake to the PC. Now Oskari Häkkinen, of the game's developer Remedy, states that the real reason why a PC port of the upcoming Xbox 360 action-adventure game was canceled.

Chatting with VG247.com, Häkkinen (kind of) refutes the reason Microsoft gave for the PC version's cancellation where it implied that Alan Wake was better played on a sofa in front of a TV. So what's the real reason? Häkkinen states, " . . . we're a small studio. We're 50 people, and being a small studio, it makes a lot more sense for us to focus on one platform:" And what about a PC port at some time in the future? He says, " I think that's a decision to sit down [and make] with our publisher... and see where the title goes."

There wasn't much in the way of PC gaming news at Microsoft's recent X10 press event but there was one minor detail that slipped out during the mostly Xbox 360 media get-together. The company announced that Game Room, their downloadable virtual space, will be made available for both the PC and Xbox 360 this March.

Just a reminder for those of us who came in late: Game Room, from developer Krome Studios, will give players a chance to create their own virtual space (complete with your own virtual you) where you can put in arcade machines and play the classic games of old. You can either own the games outright or even play per session just like putting in a quarter in an arcade machine. Our question: will our virtual game room have virtual cigarette smells like the 80's arcades?

Alan Wake may have begun its life as a PC game but now its publisher Microsoft has apparently confirmed that the long awaited action title from Remedy Entertainment will now be an Xbox 360 exclusive with no plans at all to bring the game to the PC.

An official statement from Microsoft, posted at Strategy Informer, states that the publisher felt that the game was best suited to be played "from the couch in front of a larger TV screen". Alan Wake was first announced as a PC game by Remedy in 2005. In 2006 Microsoft bought the publishing rights to the game, saying it would appear on both the PC and Xbox 360 consoles. After that the game's development went into an extended stealth mode until 2009 when Microsoft finally started promoting Alan Wake again but as an Xbox 360 exclusive. Last July Remedy said the decision to make the game for the PC was up to Microsoft.

Valve's Steam service lets its users voluntarily upload their PC system specs up to be compared and contrasted and every month Valve offers up updated surveys of what their users have inside their PCs. Their January 2010 survey results are in and the results show that Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system has now overtaken Windows Vista in gamers' PCs.

Combining both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, Windows 7 now has a 28.53 percent slice of the OS pie in the survey while Windows Vista's slice has 27.91 percent of Steam users. Now the Windows 7 numbers may be somewhat inflated due to the fact that some of Steam's users may still be using the free release candidate version of the OS that was released in 2009. That version will begin to become unusable in March and will shut down completely in June. It's also worth noting that the 32 bit version of Windows XP blows both Windows 7 and Vista away with 41.15 percent of Steam users still using the now 10 year old OS in their PCs.