The Vole sticks the knife in to yet another Halo "partner" ... oh my!

It's hard to believe that any developer making a game based on Halo could be shut down for financial reasons, but that's the fate awaiting Dallas-based Ensemble Studios.

Microsoft, which owns Ensemble, recently told the successful, well-regarded maker of strategy games that it will be shuttered after its newest game, Halo Wars, is finished in a few months.

Bruce Shelley, a high-profile designer at Ensemble, said on his official blog that when Microsoft delivered the bad news earlier this month, "Everyone at our studio was shocked."

First Microsoft mugs Bungie then kicks them out onto the street, and now this.

Maybe it would be a good idea for games devs to simply avoid Halo, since it seems to be as cursed as the infamous Xbox 360 itself, and its equally infamous Xbox Live service.

It hasn't exactly been a great year for the Vole, what with losing 90 Billion Dollars in the first half of the year, then another 24 Billion - in just 2 weeks - recently. Let's not even get started about their 40 Billion dollar stock buyback.

Of course, thanks to Microsoft, it's not exactly a great year for Halo developers either ... nor its fans.

But it may turn out to be the best year ever for those who want to see the end of Microsoft's reign of terror, as they pillaged and plundered their way through the IT industry, with their gangster mentality and racketeering operations. At this rate, the Vole's days of plundering may soon come to an abrupt end, and finally the industry can flourish with competition coexisting in relative harmony and parity, in a Free Market economy, rather than the Vole's current monopoly.

I live in hope.

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