A million goodbyes to Ensemble Studios

newsguy 0 Tallied Votes 123 Views Share

I guess that it will be of little comfort to the developers who lost jobs when Ensemble Studios was closed down earlier this year, but the final game to come out of the Microsoft owned outfit has just become the biggest selling Real Time Strategy title ever to grace any of the current generation consoles.

Yes, Halo Wars has hit the big one million sales number worldwide according to Microsoft, following in the grand tradition of the Halo franchise to break records. But that's not all, according to the official in-game stats site there have also been more than 2 million multiplayer games fought and close on 120 years of player time spent fighting them. To put that into a little context, it works out to around 200,000 players fighting online every single day since the game was released at the back end of February.

Texas-based Ensemble Studios was perhaps best known for the Age of Empire game, and was acquired by Microsoft in 2001. Unfortunately, Microsoft pulled the plug on the development company on January 29th and this has left gamers wondering where Halo Wars will go from here. The game is just crying out for downloadable content, and let's face it no Halo title is complete without at least one DLC pack.

The good news is that some of the key developers from Ensemble have set up Robot Entertainment which has promised to continue to support the title. Indeed, it would appear that DLC development is already underway although, naturally, everyone is keeping very tight lipped about the details for the time being.