Fwd: 'Rare' departure could signal dramatic shift in Microsoft's attitude towards hardcore gaming on next gen.

This week, it was revealed that George Andreas has jumped ship on Microsoft for the safer gaming shores of Sony CE.

It will come as hardly a surprise to anyone that Microsoft, of late, is not exactly focused on the hardcore gamer.  In amongst the dull roar of casual games, WIndows 8 propoganda (did you know 'Xbox' no longer refers to console gaming??), dozens of apps that no one wants and a downright unhealthy re-prioritisation on motion control....well, one could be forgiven for losing interest in Microsoft's brand of gaming.

However, it's all good, right?  The '720' is due for imminent announcement.  Going by rumours, it's to be quite the machine with 8 cores of CPU grunt, an only 'slightly-out-of-date' AMD chipset with DirectX 11 on-board and of all things: a dreaded Blu-Ray drive!  There's just one tiny, itsy-witsy problem I have: who's going to write the games?  Obviously a throng of Microsoft fanboys will throw out brand staples such as 'Halo', and 'Gears of War' (or god-forbid - another 'Crackdown') but who cares?  Neither franchise has ever been of great interest to me and while no one can deny that these franchises have impressed on occasion, they are hardly alone in that competency; there simply is a lot to choose from these days.

Sony, on the other hand, is desparately trying to kickstart the glory-days of the Playstation brand and they are still heavily investing in 1st Party BUT also working much harder with 3rd-party studios to make the PS4 a more savvy, more attractive destination.  Microsoft doesn't care about this at all - they are focused on residuals and these days, the sense behind those residuals is based on (what I perceive to be) extremely pigeon-holed, limited R&D that probably uses the families of its own staff over the traditional, wide-reaching world-class R&D centres that Microsoft used to champion years ago (before Ballmer).

While no one is really going to care about who or what George Andreas is or does, the fact that he's left one cushy job for another suggests that Microsoft is simply not talking the talk that serious studio gamers want to listen to.  Who can blame him.  The last interesting thing I read on Major Nelson's blog was something about Crackle coming to Xbox apps...

Really.  That's nice.

Good luck to George and his new life at Sony.