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Working At FASA After the Borg
amitlu writes "What's it like to be assimilated by Bill Gates' empire? Russ Pitts from The Escapist talks two game industry veterans, Bruce Shelly of Ensemble and Jordan Weisman of FASA, to contrast two hugely different opinions on the matter. While Bruce, still employed by Microsoft, has nothing but nice things to say, Weisman paints a much different picture. From the article: 'Let's say, part of what they wanted from us was our development culture, because we'd worked very hard to have this collaborative, effective team, and they wanted to kind of build those kinds of teams and kind of capture that. In reality, ... the machine of Microsoft, unintentionally, I believe, and inadvertently, ripped that apart. Rather than model itself around what we had done, our [culture] got forced into their model. ... We lost that special sauce that we had built.'" Speaking of FASA, if you're interested you can sign up for the Shadowrun Beta. They're only looking for 360 players, at the moment, and only ones with gold Live accounts.
If you read the article, you'd see The Escapist is responsible for the Borg labeling this time, not Slashdot.
Unlike what the article says, Microsoft did not acquire FASA. They only acquired FASA Interactive. FASA itself still exists as a holding company, and still owns the paper versions of their games, which they license to a variety of other companies, including WizKids, who in turn license Shadowrun to the German company FanPro, who is currently publishing the fourth edition of Shadowrun. Earthdawn is licensed to Living Room Games. Other games have been licensed to other companies.
FASA Interactive, and thus Microsoft, only owns the rights to computer games based on these settings.
Mech3 was actually Microsoft/Microprose/Zipper. It was certainly not Activision.