14 DAY TRIAL // In the gaming industry, some development studios have gained a certain degree or fame for their great franchises and high quality games, which have been entertaining players up to this day. That has been the case with Ensemble Studios, the company responsible for the Age of Empires series of Real Time Strategy (RTS) games hit.
Despite being quite loved by a lot of players, the company has been recently shut down by its owner, Microsoft, after completing the Halo Wars title, the first strategy game placed in the very popular Halo universe. Such a decision couldn't be grasped by a lot of gamers, and so, Bruce Shelley, the man who helped lead Ensemble from 1995, when it was founded, until the bitter present, decided to make a special presentation at this year's DICE summit for video game developers.
The famous game creator talked about a lot of reasons why the tough decision had been made by Microsoft, and declined to put specific responsability on one of those subjects. One of the main motives, however, was the fact that Ensemble was specialized in making strategy games, which, in recent years, haven't been as popular as they were a while back.
Also, having two main projects, of which the Halo MMO was part, canceled meant that a lot of resources were just thrown out the window. The impressive team that was brought together in order to carry out the other projects didn't decrease in number after their dismantlement, so that pointed to the studio not being as profitable with a 75-member team than with one of 40 or 45 developers.
Considering all of these facts and the tough economic climate that has led Microsoft to announce that it will lay off around 5,000 employees in the next few months, this means that Ensemble's fate has been decided quite some time before. Hopefully, the two new studios that have been formed by the former staff will entertain us in the future the same way Ensemble has.