Black Tusk Studios working on four Microsoft IPs
Microsoft's Black Tusk studio is working on four unannounced IP, according to the resume of a senior product manager.
Late last year, Microsoft opened Black Tusk Studios. The Vancouver-based outfit had big ambitions, staffing up to make a new franchise on the scale of the Halo series. As it turns out, the studio isn't satisfied with breaking ground on just one new franchise -- it's working on three more.
A LinkedIn resume (via VG247) from Black Tusk senior product manager Jonathan Browne reportedly says he's the "primary product manager on four unannounced new IP," and a "key contributor bringing these IP from the very early concept phase through green light to production." The latter part implies that each of them are in active development.
This comes amid reports that Microsoft will be debuting its console this spring, with possible plans to launch this year. It would make sense for at least some of these games to be shoring up first-party titles for the new console, and juggling four games would certainly do well for the reputation of the fledgling studio.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Black Tusk Studios working on four Microsoft IP.
Microsoft's Black Tusk studio is working on four unannounced IP, according to the resume of a senior product manager.-
I'm worried about what these four unannounced IPs are (and whether they're actually new). Microsoft Studios has gone from burning down Ensemble, FASA and ACES, to putting out pathetic quasi-casual IP rehashings (AoE Online and Microsoft Flight), and have very loudly, through marketing, proclaimed that Halo, Forza and Gears are the ruling IPs of Microsoft Studios (which, by the way, are all 360 exclusives).
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You're right, Gears 1 was ported to the PC just like Halo 1 and 2... by a separate studio, later, with lesser quality.
Halo 1 PC: Gearbox, almost two years after the original; had framerate problems, and NO model animation interpolation (come on; even Quake 2 had that back in 1998!)
Halo 2 PC: Hired Gun, 2.5 years after the original; it was a Vista exclusive (except... not really, after a clandestine patch allowed it to run on XP). Again, performance problems, and no graphical upgrades from the original.
Gears of War PC: People Can Fly, 1 year after the original. Performance was worse on PC than the 360 version, and it required Games for Windows Live for multiplayer, which at that time required a yearly fee (for PC multiplayer... when tons of other PC multiplayer games were free via community-hosted dedicated servers). Additionally, the game became unplayable after January 28, 2009, after the code signing certificate for the executable expired: http://www.shacknews.com/article/57039/epic-explains-gears-of-war
To say, "Hey, it was ported to the PC" is not the same as the PC version getting the same level of attention to detail as the flagship 360 version. Microsoft Studios doesn't do that anymore, and no studio under the Microsoft Game Studios banner has provided that much attention since Ensemble or ACES. The current "XBox Games for Windows" effort is a thin veneer for "Games on Windows RT", trying to push the XBox Live ecosystem into the Windows world. Windows 8's lack of adoption is holding that effort back, but we still have to wait a year or so for that effort to fail miserably before Microsoft changes direction with the tides, again.
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I hope a new Crimson Skies is one of them!
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While I know it's not a new IP I can hope since it would be a new IP for this generation! :\
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