{"id":1054,"date":"2008-09-10T15:00:03","date_gmt":"2008-09-10T19:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/09\/10\/no-more-ensemble\/"},"modified":"2008-09-10T15:00:03","modified_gmt":"2008-09-10T19:00:03","slug":"no-more-ensemble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/09\/10\/no-more-ensemble\/","title":{"rendered":"No More Ensemble"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d love to get a direct quote from any of the very talented designers at Ensemble (Dave Pottinger, Greg Street, Bruce Shelley) but we’ll have to make do with Microsoft’s official statements<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some outstanding questions:<\/p>\n

1) What about Halo Wars<\/em>‘s post-release support? How does the end of Ensemble impact the chances of downloadable content or patches?<\/p>\n

2) If Bruce Shelley and other core team members leave for a new studio, what happens to the Age of Empires<\/em> IP?<\/p>\n

3) What does this mean for the future of other studios owned by Microsoft?<\/p>\n

4) In spite of Halo Wars<\/em>, Ensemble is best known as a PC developer. Is this another nail in the coffin of the Games for Windows initiative?<\/p>\n

5) If a studio as successful as Ensemble is a fiscal risk for a business titan like Microsoft, what has to change in game development to make companies like this viable again?<\/p>\n

Once we see Halo Wars<\/em> and the studio closes down, it might be time for a retrospective, even though they have nothing to their credit outside of the Age<\/em> games. There’s still a lot to say about how Ensemble invented the historical RTS and transformed how the subgenre evolved. Maybe someone will sit down with me for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d love to get a direct quote from any of the very talented designers at Ensemble (Dave Pottinger, Greg Street, Bruce Shelley) but we’ll have to make do with Microsoft’s official statements. Some outstanding questions: 1) What about Halo Wars‘s post-release support? How does the end of Ensemble impact the chances of downloadable content or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[59,78],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-h0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}