Again, I'm not saying that MS has never had a successful acquisition of a popular studio -- but if you look at the overall track record of their last two decades of acquisitions, there are far more misses than hits, and that's indisputable.
Except it is quite disputable.
Here's the list of current and former subsidiaries.
Everything to do with Kinect was either closed or reassigned, which makes sense since it's a defunct tech platform that they put a lot of money in, pushed hard, and then finally (and thankfully) abandoned. Rare was a part of that ultimately, and I agree they misused Rare for a long time, but they seem to be correcting that.
Sea of Thieves isn't my thing, but it's doing well.
Outside of that thought, look at the big names of acquired studios: Double Fine, Mojang, Ninja Theory, Obsidian, ZeniMax, Bungie, Ensemble, and Lionhead Studios. I never considered Twisted Pixel a major player since they only made XBLA type of games, not triple A stuff.
Mojang is doing phenomenal for them. More recent acquisitions like Double Fine, Obsidian, ZeniMax, and Ninja Theory we'll need to wait and see, but there's certainly potential and promise there.
Bungie, as discussed, went independent again because they wanted to do something other than
Halo. Under Microsoft, that's all they did and their
Halo games were fantastic.
Destiny was never with or under Microsoft. Bungie declined
after leaving Microsoft, not with them.
Ensemble Studios had several years of excellent games and success under Microsoft. I'm not sure why they were closed though.
Lionhead, as discussed, had problems and were bailed out by Microsoft. They did one great game under them, and then struggled and continued to have internal issues, the roots of which seem to predate Microsoft.
So of all the major studios that "went there to die," Rare is the only one that truly suffered under Microsoft's leadership, but they seem to be rebounding as Microsoft has improved in it's leadership and direction.
