arugulaKhan: While I agree that IP ownership would simplify the legal hassles, the real problem with Battletech games is that they cater to a very specific audience and don't bring in the sort of blockbuster profits that would entice a dev to stick with one game long enough to give us something worthwhile.
To me, Battletech is like W40K: they throw out crumbs every now and again to satisfy their core audience, but you seldom get a good game in the process. It's like they're afraid that if they finally made a decent title with a complete unit roster and everything a fan would want, then their tabletop income would suffer.
Whereas the truth is, folks that like physical maps, dice and figurines will still like 'em even if a computer game analog comes along...
That may be true for the recent BattleTech game and maybe MechCommander, but MechWarrior the tabletop game is a different type of game entirely compared to MechWarrior the video game. Getting people into niche tabletop-like gameplay could potentially be a hard sell for the masses, but pitching a MechWarrior video game as massive robot piloting battles should be an easier task given an appropriately-funded marketing team. EA did it with Titanfall (though they took a bit of a different approach), and I could see Microsoft's money being able to draw enough attention to MechWarrior to at least pull it out of the "niche" category. And none of that would be at the expense of tabletop income.
(And yeah, I have no idea what goes on with 40K games. I'm not a big 40K fan, but it feels like Games Workshop will slap the 40K IP on literally any video game to make a few bucks only to delist it when it under-performs because they didn't do their own QA on it. Seems like they need to be a bit more involved in the dev process for their video game adaptations. But like you said, any time/money spent on 40K video games is effort taken away from tabletop development.)
