"The reality is that every single game we shipped took twice as long as we said it was going to take, and cost twice as much to make.

In his impassioned talk during the "rants" session, Bettner, now working at iPhone developer NewToy, blamed himself for the cost, inefficiency and poor quality of life caused by Ensemble's dependence on long, "crunch" working hours.

Ensemble had a company culture where "everyone was a workaholic", developers worked late and slept at the office, and were addicted to the rush of success of the Age of Empires series.

"I watched this happen and I did almost nothing to stop it. As an employee, and later as a manager, I didn't take a stand. I just kept hoping for that next high," Bettner said.

The truth of the matter is, Ensemble Studios, while certainly fond of numerous inefficient development practices, was no costlier or less efficient than any other developer of our caliber during this period of operation.

There were certainly people at Ensemble who did not like working long hours for extended periods (all of them, in fact) but your implication that it was a place that used people up is wholly untrue and contrary to all evidence.

The leadership of Ensemble Studios saw crunch as a failure. While it was certainly used, it was never “institutionalized” or accepted. Tony Goodman, Harter Ryan, Chris Rippy, and David Pottinger, in particular, worked to eliminate or at least reduce it constantly and we improved this with each game.

Every single game Ensemble Studios made, across more than a decade, paid for it’s development and made a profit. Microsoft had it’s reasons for closing the studio but to imply that it was because we cost too much is fiction.

By apologising for your inactions “as a manager”, you suggest that you were a manager and therefore imply that you have some insight into the operation of the studio or into the justifications for our closing. You were never a member of the management team at Ensemble Studios. For that matter, neither you, nor anyone else, was “Creative Director” at our studio. You were in no way involved in any of the conversations between Ensemble’s and Microsoft’s leadership regarding the closure of the studio.

If you want to find mistakes with what we did, I’d suggest that those trips into the weeds, looking for new territory, with a partner who wasn’t fond of being there, was more our error. Had we decided to crank out RTS after RTS instead of chasing after the MMOs and FPSs and RPGs and RTS-differents we constantly had in prototype, I’m sure we would have been a more efficient studio that could have operated with zero crunch.

The vast majority of us didn’t want to do this. I’m glad for that.