Ensemble Studios officially closed its doors last week, and Gamasutra was there for a final tour. They also report on the never-to-be Halo MMO, which turns out was a very serious project for Microsoft. Serious enough to actually start building Ensemble a campus to support it.

Rumors have been floating around since 2006 that a Halo MMO was in development, although this has never been solidly confirmed by any studio. It's recently revealed that the MMO was indeed real.

Unfortunately, it was canceled.

Yeah, anticlimactic huh? Anyway, check out screenshots of the never-to-be Halo MMO after the link.

Less gamers are clocking in hours to spend time playing PC games online, according to Xfire's latest report. Numbers began to drop since August. Xfire senior director of marketing Frederic Descamps believes there's a very apparent reason behind this - many tried to finish the fight, while others continue to play Bungie Studios' Halo 3 on the Microsoft Xbox 360 instead of their PC gaming rigs.

More details at the full article!

In a 1UP podcast show, one of Bungie's developers reveals his true gaming self: he's a WoW-head - and a very disturbingly geekish one at that! He reveals his broad knowledge of the World of Warcraft by issuing his two cents worth of the current issues involved in the WoW community.

And that includes his comments on the 2.1.0 patch coming up for World of Warcraft (soon, hopefully), which covers the recent addressing of the consumables requirement for end-game raids, how Lady Vashj got owned, and the Can't Quit You guild (which apparently should have been "Can't Quit You, WoW!" guild) which reached over 500 members and stopped recruiting.

Now while Brian Jarrard isn't the first industry celeb to go online and make his WoW addiction known, he didn't feel shy to reveal his love for being a Priest, a Druid and an enhancement Shaman. And get this: Bungie has a guild stuffed with the lot of them, but since (and we quote) "...[Bungie has] been distracted [because they're] working on Halo 3...," they're only now reduced to a small "core" of them who still play the game. Funny how it's not the other way around!

Halo 3 delayed by World of Warcraft addiction? Whoa, that'll be the day... Still, you cannot help but notice a growing trend as the MMO market expands to even the game developers themselves!  As 1Up stated in their summarized the phenomenon in their Legendary Thread:

So instead of just playing WoW, they also now talk about playing WoW. And record it, so that when you aren't playing WoW, or thinking about WoW, or talking about WoW, you can listen to other people talking about WoW. It's magical!

Despite the all scuttlebutt  surrounding Halo 3 and the upcoming movie since E3, the rumored MMO version is apparently not forthcoming. Instead, developer Bungie is putting its efforts into an upcoming PC version of Halo 2 that will require Windows Vista in order to run.  This version is being constructed especially for the Window Vista OS, and will include a map editor - so don't look for any cross platform matches between this and the XBox or XBox 360.

The upside is, PC gamers will still be able to use their old DirectX 9 compatible graphics card, even though Halo 2 is DirectX 10 enabled.

Regarding the rumored MMO version of Halo 3, a Bungie representative had this to say: "We'd never say 'never' to anything. I can tell you we're not working on those things today though".