Re: No, please no!
Microsoft didn't develop Age of Empires or Flight Simulator, they bought them both from other companies.
Ensemble made Age of Empires, and both AoE 1 and 2 were already on sale several years before MS bought the company. Under Microsoft's ownership, Ensemble only made three more games - Age of Mythology, AoE 3 and Halo Wars - before MS disbanded them and their staff went elsewhere. They were still making Halo Wars when MS fired all their staff and offered cash to some soon to be fired developers to stay behind a while to finish it off. Nice way to kill your dev studio who sold 20m games worth half a billion dollars!
The flight sim was initially licenced from Bruce Artwick, who specialised in making flight simulation software. There was a top-selling version for the Apple II, and so naturally MS wanted it too and licenced one of their flight sims in 1981 to show how superior the graphics were on the 16-bit PC compared to the 8-bit Apple II. Atwick's new company was bought by MS in 1995 and renamed Ace Games Studio, who then further developed the game before they too were closed down around the same time as Ensemble, in 2009. MS sold the source code for the game to Lockheed Martin who now sell it for hundreds of dollars a copy.
Microsoft have always been greedy, but they were never good at making games, Microsoft is where good games companies go to die.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
