[…]there’s another story to be told here — and it’s older and, if possible, even sadder. Microsoft has simply never been any good at running game studios.

The waste — of time, money, and human potential — is incalculable. And it’s a sadly familiar story. In 2006, Microsoft acquired the legendary British developer Lionhead, only to close it ten years later after forcing the studio to chase fads it was ill-suited to, like motion control and live-service games. Rare, acquired for a then-record-breaking $375 million in 2002, has seemed to skirt close to a similar fate several times as it searched for a place within the Xbox family that made sense and played to its strengths. Pirate game Sea of Thieves has kept the developer afloat in recent years, but how much longer can that last?

Microsoft’s original sin in this arena was its handling of Bungie. The studio was an inspired early acquisition that almost single-handedly made Xbox’s reputation among gamers with its Halo series. But Microsoft responded to this success by stifling Bungie’s creativity with a forced march of sequel production that ultimately drove the studio away: It bought itself out in 2007. The Halo brand never recovered from the loss, and the mismanagement of the caretaker studio founded to take it over, 343 Industries (now Halo Studios), was arguably even worse. It was never allowed to develop its own identity, and saddled with tasks — including maintaining its own game engine, and turning Halo into an ill-defined forever game — that were clearly beyond its capabilities.

The truth is that much of Microsoft’s decision-making as a publisher seems to come from a place of insecurity. Burned by its experiences with Bungie, Lionhead, and Rare, the company began a partial retreat from first-party development under previous Xbox boss Don Mattrick. When the resulting weakness of its slate of games became all too apparent, Mattrick’s successor Phil Spencer began a massive overcorrection, buying studios left, right, and center.

If the goal of the spending spree was to turn Xbox into a first-party powerhouse with system-selling exclusives to rival Nintendo and Sony, Microsoft has failed — or, arguably, overshot the mark. The acquisitions of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard brought it properties like Call of Duty, Warcraft, and The Elder Scrolls that were too big to make exclusive. Combined with a strategic shift away from consoles and toward PC, subscriptions, and cloud gaming, Microsoft has become something quite different: the biggest game publisher the world has ever seen, bigger than any platform. In that context, nurturing vanity projects like Everwild or resuscitating old IP like Perfect Dark simply isn’t a priority.