While I love the Halo franchise deeply, 343 dropped the ball. Recently another company dropped the ball and their "something big" was a free DLC to Assassin's Creed: Unity owners... Not exactly the best offer, especially to folks that purchased things like the Season Pass.
I am not sure what 343 could do to appease early adopters for The Master Chief collection, besides Microsoft is attempting to apologize for their studio's biff-up by offering $15 in credit...
I wonder how much of this is actually due to really poor resource (read: money) management. Take Ubisoft for instance; the development team for Assassin's Creed: Unity was massive, absolutely massive. Does it really need to be that big? Are they spending more money than they have? Are they launching the games in a broken state so they can get the initial funding to actually fixing the problems? Maybe it is just me, but I see a whee bit more success in the mid-size development studios when...
I think I could agree with that list, but would also add Rocksteady Studios (Batman Arkham titles) and CD Projekt RED (Witcher titles) to the list of solid release studios. I am sure there are more out there, especially 'medium' studios, too large to be indie developers but too small to be a large conglomerate.
It may just be me, but I am seeing a big trend in the AAA games (or highly hyped games) area where it really feels like the development studios and the publish...