Microsoft closes Victoria Studio

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/12/05/microsoft-closes-victoria-studio-moves-development-to-vancouver/

This studio was responsible for Kinect Adventures and other Kinect games (I believe Kinectimals as well)

They closed it in less than 2 years since it opened (or so it says) and it was a 1 BILLION DOLLAR investment so this must be hurting. However the project the teams their were working on will not be stopped.

Now the question is what were these projects? Hopefully Crackdown 3 was not involved in that.

Not a loss to the gaming community.

The lose of Ensemble is still hurting though

@Jakandsigz: They probably are cosolidated the staff. I'm not sure what Kinect games M$ has in the future besides Kinect Rivals. I would love to see something innovative. I decent RPG that actually works well with Kinect would be cool. They need to stop with the fighting games though. They've all been crap.

Ensemble was best thing MS ever had, and they kill them off after forcing a Halo game... People still playing AOE2 to this day.

Bungie was the best thing MS ever had. Although, Halo 4 is still a great game even w/o bungie. I can't wait to see Halo 5 and 343 is not going anywhere (I hope).

Ensemble is like #2 though. I have had so many great memories of AoE rts series. Brilliant games.

They only have 2 kinect fighting games.

Halo Wars was a really good game though, shame MS closed Ensemble though.

I thought it was pretty good. I enjoyed it for a console RTS but I think MS put a lot of pressure on them. I should have been developed for PC. It was ensemble strong suit.

Microsoft was the best thing Microsoft have. Were is my Combat flight simulator, my sports games that would crap on EA's, my Space Simulator, my regular flight simulator, by freaking Blood wake which MS people collaborated with other devs to make, same with Fusion Frenzy, and maybe actually give Blinx one more try.

I was thinking of the Flight Simulator studios while posting in this thread about Ensemble. Those games were so good. Ugh... memories

There are currently over 4,000 people playing Halo Wars.

This studio was responsible for Kinect Adventures and other Kinect games (I believe Kinectimals as well)

And nothing of value was lost.

They closed it in less than 2 years since it opened (or so it says) and it was a 1 BILLION DOLLAR investment so this must be hurting.

Ohhhh. Ummm, I guess I spoke too soon. Ouch.

However the project the teams their were working on will not be stopped.

Another Kinect game... yay?

Sounds like they're just centralizing development to the Vancouver BC studio. Victoria is a nice place and not far from Vancouver but it's kind of geographically isolated by a significant body of water. Nothing really sounds like anything is being lost. It doesn't say people are getting fired or projects getting cancelled or anything like that. Staff can just take a ferry into work every morning if they're living in Victoria or if they're living in Vancouver and ferrying to work in Victoria then things will be easier for them.

For what they were the Kinectimals where not that bad. My daughter loved them, they really did do a great job with the game.

Bu bu but muh billion dollar investment

Will be funny when MS Osaka turns out to be a localisation studio for F2P mobile games.

This was part of the investment--a sum not known; not thee investment.

noteworthy news would be nintendo closing one of their studios. Has that ever happened and why has it not happened yet considering that they are in so called dire straits.

Nintendo said they don't fire people. They just assign them to new products. That's why when studios that make games like the Golden Sun series don't sell enough copies, they assign them to Mario Tennis games instead of closing them down.