Slashdot Mirror
Sweeping Changes At Microsoft Studios Kill Lionhead Studios and Fable (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Microsoft has announced sweeping changes at Microsoft Studios, affecting development teams in the UK and Denmark. In sad news for gamers, development of Fable Legends has been brought to an end. The Fable series is one that has suffered numerous setbacks and delays over the years, but this is the biggest blow yet. More than this, the team behind Fable — Lionhead Studios — is at risk of closure, and Microsoft is in talks with employees about this. General Manager of Microsoft Studios Europe, Hanno Lemke, also announced that Press Play Studios in Denmark will close, leading to the end of development on Project Knoxville.
Maybe they could keep it alive if they'd make the Fable 2 PC port that we have wanted for years
Yes they did good stuff back in the day. Lately nothing out of that whole huge back catalogue. Good on MS for shutting down a stagnant failing studio.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Flight Simulator is sorely missed guys.
Thankfully this might help finally stop that blowhard douchebag, Peter Molyneux, the guy responsible for all 3 versions of Fable being awful.
but somehow, I never pictured Lionshead getting shut down, even by our benevolent overlord Microsoft Studios. It was too iconic. It's a fixture. Hell, if it inherited just a tiny part of Peter Molyneux's ego, it should have been immortal.
I suppose the idea of Yet Another MMORPG getting shut down isn't a shocker, though. If you want to kill a good game idea dead, attempt to implement it as an MMO. And, to be completely sure, develop it at Microsoft Studios, the great elephant graveyard of gaming. It's the gaming equivalent of lifting off and nuking it from space.
Oh, yeah, original summary doesn't have a linky. Linky.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Never found a good replacement, and I refuse to give EA money.
or choosing to sell out to them.
Flight Simulator is sorely missed guys.
Even if they had the budget, it wouldn't help. The team is scattered to the four winds and all the needed infrastructure to make a full-fledged version of Flight Simulator is gone.
You can thank Don Mattrick and Phil Spencer (head of MGS at the time) for that.
Microsoft buys game companies and a few years later shuts them down. You can almost guarantee that any game company that MS purchases will be run into the ground in about 3 years. See once all the higher ups have fulfilled their obligations to stay for a certain amount of time they flee Microsoft and start another game company using all the funds they extracted from MS. Shortly after it's a bloodbath and everyone that's any good jumps ship.
Microsoft, it's where good game companies go to die.
seems like this is a once a month occurrence...and it typically goes something like this:
....microsoft releases a new windows...proclaims its the greatest ever....it begins failing...
1. Microsoft gets slaughtered to the tune of hundreds of millions on a new offering...for example, surface losing 600 million in 2014.
2. Microsoft pretends that didnt happen, releases a new surface.
3. eight months pass, the new surface incurs another hundred million in loss.
4. Microsoft pretends losses are due to economic factors and not representative of anything more than a downturn in consumer demand.
5. Microsoft spends, say, the year of 2014, firing twenty thousand employees while muttering "this is okay, this is normal" in a soothing monotone to any onlooking press.
6. People point out the microsoft store is failing, the phone offering is also suffering huge losses, and the only thing using the microsoft cloud is the colocational datacenter racks that hold it up.
7.
8. Microsoft announces it will now strap Xbox indelably to the haggared burro known as Windows 10...they will form a new perfect union...like beer belch flavoured doritos or stale cigar flavoured icecream.
Good people go to bed earlier.
How much money has Microsoft pissed away doing stuff like this?
When you count up all the failures and the aborted projects and half-baked shit they've abandoned, it's incredible that this company is still above water.
For example, how many tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work did they lose just by crashing the Fable Legends project? It's mind boggling to me.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
On the plus side the staff can just move en-masse to a Starbucks of their choice and start up again as co-owners.
Requiem for the American Dream
Even if they had the budget, it wouldn't help. The team is scattered to the four winds and all the needed infrastructure to make a full-fledged version of Flight Simulator is gone.
You're tearing me apart...
Word
Much of the flight sim community has moved over to X-Plane 10 now. Like FSX it requires add-ons to shine, but it is based on a modern 64 bit engine (so no ram problems like FSX has), and is under active development with a large community around it.
FSX still does some things better than XP10 does, but XP10 does other things better than FSX does.
within a few months the power will be restored to the people.
I never understood why anyone thought they were an iconic studio. The only game they ever delivered in the scale and originality they promised was Black & White. Fable, while good, was already showing cracks (compared to what Molyneux promised) and the only other original IP was The Movies, which - while also being an interesting concept - was a costly flop. That's all. Their last decade was basically spilling out Fable sequels in worsening quality, parallel of how Molyneux became more and more depressed and actually mad. After (and actually before) he left, there wasn't a strong, visionary lead there. Microsoft was actually merciful to keep them around this long.
MS has a long history of fucking over game studios.
Fable went to shit when they made the decision to tie it to Kinect. If there is any genre that should not need a Kinect bolt on, it is theasy RPG style that Fable falls into.
I was actually come sidelong buying a XBONE just because of the Fable series, until I found out they were bolting Kinect onto this thing.
So no The Movies 2? :(
let's all REJOICE in the gift given to Linux users!
oh, wait... it was shitcanned.. LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE FOR LINUX!
...this story may not have happened at all if the last Fable game had allowed for controller play instead of just using the Kinect all the time.
Most people still actually LIKE console controllers, and being disallowed from using them is actively harmful to the success of a game. This is even more true when many users also have trouble performing the motions necessary to make their character perform as they desire. It's hard to mess up a button press, but easy to mess up motion recognition. I actually blame Microsoft for this decision, because I can't actually imagine a sane gamer/game developer actually believing it a good idea to only rely on motion recognition for an RPG.
Also, tying in with Fable Heroes may not have been the best choice.
Second Word
Any company that has had any dealings with Mark Healey deserves to go tits up.
...
oh hai mark!
Lionhead used to be a PC game maker, but now Microsoft only lets them make games for a console that I don't know anyone who owns. Really, how are gaming giants like the ones who made Black & White expected to remain profitable if they are only making software for no-name console brands?
Ever since the piece of s**t that was "Black and White", anything by Lionhead is on my auto-ignore list.
Thanks for nothing Mircosoft you bunch of money grubbing, greedy assholes.....