Tim Baleno | AirneanachTV

In 2009 Ensemble Studios was shut down. We were profitable. We were mid-project. In fact, we'd never sold less than 3 million copies of any game! This decision was made by Don Mattrick, then head of MicroSoft Games. I was told that apparently his deal with MicroSoft was that if he could make the game division profitable in 3 years, he'd get a huge bonus. Well, you'd think that a company like Ensemble, which always made a profit, would be desirable. But here's the nub - our plan was to build a gigantic Halo-based MMO for our next project. This project would obviously be expensive (and Ensemble was a pretty high-priced studio to maintain), but the SMALLEST estimate we heard (from MicroSoft) was that it would earn at least $1.1 billion over its first few years. That's billion, not million. You can imagine for yourself how huge a Halo MMO built by Ensemble would have been. But here was the problem from Mr. Mattrick's point of view. Our estimated time to completion was 3 1/2 years away. And in 3 years, the world ends for Mattrick - his bonus vanishes. So he made the decision to close us down and then NOT have to pay our salaries for 3 years in order to maximize his personal chances for a bonus. This of course denied MicroSoft stockholders a chance at a billion-dollar franchise, but f*ck them, right? Now, as I said, this is what I was told by people from Microsoft who ought to know the truth. But I don't know it of my own personal experience. It does make sense because why otherwise get rid of the most profitable game company Microsoft had? A number of fans made memorial videos for our game studio, which I still find remarkable. My favourite ended on a scene of hussars cutting down helpless villagers, which is exactly the right tone. We didn't die, or fade away. We were murdered. Do I regret it? Yeah, sort of. I would have been in charge of all the lore for the universe, which would have been super-fun. But it's not like getting laid off killed us. We all went on to other careers, mostly working for Microsoft's rivals which probably hurt them more than losing our MMO in the long run. And Mattrick got his comeuppance when he bungled X-Box Live.