Microsoft Reports Profit, Burnout Paradise Dated, & More
Microsoft Reports 27% Revenue Growth; Fastest First Quarter Since 1999
“Customer demand for Windows Vista this quarter continued to build with double-digit growth in multi-year agreements by businesses and with the vast majority of consumers purchasing premium editions,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft.
During the quarter, Microsoft’s two consumer focused divisions passed milestones with the successful close of the company’s largest ever acquisition, aQuantive, and Halo 3 achieving the biggest entertainment launch day in history.
It’s not a coincidence that Microsoft has every big game this fall (with a lot of being exclusive). The people that work with the third-party developers have done an excellent job planning all this for the past one or two years, and now this fall they’re going to see the benefit (and they already are).
In other news, Burnout Paradise will be coming out January 22nd, and will have a demo on the Marketplace in December. They’ve been working on it quite a while, and it has a lot of new changes and features, but hopefully it has a good overall feel to the driving in it. The first three Burnout games did an excellent job with that, but the fourth one just felt weird to me for some reason.
A new Halo video has also gone up on Marketplace, but it’s not actually new. It’s just all three live action Halo shorts edited together.
Director Neill Blomkamp explores the lives of Marines and ODSTs on a last, desperate mission in a post-invasion Earth – a mission that may secure the salvation, or usher the destruction of the entire galaxy. Edited together as a standalone piece for the first time, these three shorts are the first glimpse at what a live-action Halo could and should look like and a must-see for Halo fans of every stripe.