-> 36 games

“Games from Ubisoft are only available in Canada and the United States.”

And “de Plater” complains? There are thousands of people around the world enraged with that Steam limitation and he complains that people don’t buy games?!

Yeah, right, piracy this, piracy that… put the damn games on Steam with package discounts and you’ll see what is selling games.

We are getting tired of this. People want to play and buy good games and the only requests are:
- good games (no bugs, Ubi usually has a problem with this)
- good prices (at least put package discounts)
- easy to buy (Steam is the fastest and easy way today to sell games, AND without DRM)!

This is getting ridiculous… they don’t know shit about the market and piracy… and when (the gamers) want to tell them what we need to buy more games, they don’t even have a damn EMAIL to send our concerns.

Yes “de Plater”, you have what you deserve. Listen to the gamers and stop whining. Piracy is not going anywhere, so just be SMART and find ways to make sells more attractive.
GET IT?

Anyway, it’s not all that strange really. What’s obvious is that Microsoft has long term goals, which are planned out. They’d be a bit bloody silly if they were just ditching companies which made them money otherwise, wouldn’t they? At the moment, they’re all about strengthening the X-Box 360, so whatever they’re doing is going to be towards that end, but a long term goal.

I don’t know what their plans are yet really, I never could understand Microsoft. But I too have a gut feeling that it doesn’t involve the PC much and that the chap is right.

Which is a good thing really, because as I’ve said elsewhere this opens the door to multi-platform development and indie developers getting their foot in the door. And neither of these things can be bad. It just means that the PC will be getting a lot of ingenious games to add to its library (and I love my World of Goo as much as I love my LittleBigPlanet), and it means that they won’t be available for Windows alone.

If distros like Ubuntu and Android, and the Macintosh platform can really take the time now to step up their support and the awareness of their products and exploit this, then that’ll only hasten this bright and all too possible future which I hope for so dearly.

The PC landscape is open to change at the moment, it’s stagnating and it’s all ready to burst. The PC we have in say… 2012 is going to be a very different beast to the PC we know today, I think. I’m just going to sit back, watch, and enjoy the ride.

The only possible explanation is that they’re not confident enough about the quality of Halo Wars to feel the need to make a sequel.

It’s pretty much common practice that franchises are milked for evey angle and sequel possible, and franchises don’t come much bigger than Halo.

If Halo Wars is a AAA game, then surely the most logical thing for MS to do is to add a few bells and whistles to it and release Halo Wars 2 in 18 months, then just sit back and pick up easy cheques.

Why in the world would you shut down an entire studio when they’ve finished work on one of the biggest 1st party titles for the 360??

I doubt very much that it’s to do with PC piracy, as Ensemble would have been ready to switch to console development just like so many other companies, given the option.

They were developing a 360 game anyway…

The only real reason that I can see for Ensemble closing was that MS were really unhappy with the either the game or the dev process and didn’t want to have to go through the whole thing ever again. After all, they can just give Halo Wars to any other capable studio.

MS have been acting strangely in this regard recently though. They’ve taken PGR from Bizarre, and rumour has it that they’re even taking Halo from Bungie iirc.

It’s all very strange.

It makes sense when you think about it, in MS’s eyes it is much better for them if you do your gaming on their console and all your other stuff like surfing etc on a PC with their operating system. It stinks but then MS is a business and it doesn’t care about loyalty or what the customer wants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvJ7yez0elk