Microsoft Cancels 2004 Xbox Sports Lineup

madopal writes "Well, it's no secret that Microsoft has been slashing internal development (Mythica, anyone?). Now, they've announced that they're cancelling their entire 2004 line-up of XSN Sports games for Xbox. Wow, with Ed Fries gone, it sure is a different place over there." The article quotes Kevin Browne of Microsoft as saying: "We need to be making great games, and the marketplace told us that we're just not at that level."

Comments

Re:i like quote

[*weasel]

Age of Empires
Asheron's Call
Flight Simulator
Halo
MechAssault
Crimson Skies
Project Gotham Racing
Counter-strike
Shenmue

Maybe they're not your cup of tea, but for millions of other gamers, they are great games. That Microsoft published them demonstrates an ability to identify quality games, and bring them to their gamers -- the only attribute worth having in a publisher.

In my opinion, this move only demonstrates further that Microsoft does 'get' gaming. Their sports games were also-rans, and completely unnecessary given the great lineup of third-party sports titles for their system. Cutting them was a smart move.

Re:i like quote

[PainKilleR-CE]

Shenmue is a Sega title, Counter-Strike is a Valve title. As far as I know, the rest of those are in-house or 2nd party titles, so I have no issues there.

What most people really seem to be missing here is that Microsoft cut the titles to work on the next year's titles, rather than cutting their sports line completely. They also make it fairly clear in the interview that the most well-received titles (Top Spin and Amped) were never considered yearly titles, and were therefore not part of the cut (though sequels may not have been in the works yet).

Microsoft has a lot of solid code in their sports titles, especially with the number of code bases they have to derive from in some areas (like baseball titles). All they are doing now is giving their developers more time to make their titles competetive with EA and Sega titles. They seemed to be close their first year out, but their latest run definitely fell flat. This was probably the only way to save these titles, even if it means they won't have a new series on the shelves for a year (and isn't one of the biggest complaints about these types of games the fact that they don't improve much in a year anyway?).