Microsoft rejigs gaming team

THE VOLE HAS SHIFTED around chaps at the top of its gaming division, leaving newbie Chris Early as head of the games for Windows Live.

Early was previous a Volista in the Casual Games division. The half-time substitution seems to indicate that things aren't exactly going as well for the GFWL team as it might have hoped. A Vista-exclusive gaming platform that replicates the features of the successful Xbox Live, launch titles that support GFWL are Shadowrun and Halo 2. Halo 2, of course, is a release of a game that's been out for three years on the Xbox and which any FPS gamer has already done to death; Shadowrun is a multiplayer-only deathmatch game that has been generally criticised for lacking depth and being too expensive for the amount of gameplay included. All in all, then, an inauspicious start for the platform.

The Vole must be hoping that Early can woo some bigger developers to take part in the Games For Windows Live platform - a tough sell when most developers don't want to go Vista-only and want to maintain a degree of control over their multiplayer servers.

However, it's not all bad for Microsoft's gaming division, as the Xbox 360 is continuing to sell well and attract some good games - such as the exclusive downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto. This has clearly left a rather bitter taste in Sony's mouth, as top bod Jack Tretton has accused Microsoft of 'bribing' developers to bring exclusives to the table.

"We don't buy exclusivity. We don't fund development," Tretton said in an interview, single-handedly revealing why Rockstar chose to go with Microsoft and not Sony for the exclusive GTA4 deal - money talks, this is the videogame business, folks.

He went on to, we might suggest, grossly overstate the success of Sony's position in the game development marketplace. "Microsoft is too dependent upon the third-party community, and Nintendo is too dependent upon first-party," Tretton proposed, managing to name two consoles that are selling faster than the PS3 around the world. If both have the wrong approach, the game-buying public sure doesn't seem to care. µ