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.

Comments

Fable 2 PC

[mwn3d]

Maybe they could keep it alive if they'd make the Fable 2 PC port that we have wanted for years

Re:Fable 2 PC

[__aaclcg7560]

Are you suggesting there is more money to be made developing for the PC?

All it takes is a single best selling PC game that takes advantage of hardware not available on the current gen consoles to convince developers that a pot of gold lies over yonder. Let's call it the Deadpool Effect. Now that Fox brought out an R-rated comic book movie that made a pot of gold, every wannabe studio will make R-rated comic book movies. Most will be terrible, a few will shine.

Re:Fable 2 PC

[vilanye]

It sucks that Dredd wasn't the R-rated comic book movie to start that trend.

Re:Fable 2 PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen Steam numbers and actual academic studies of how much more pirates buy actual stuff in comparison to non-pirates?
In the PC space, what matters is not the initial revenue but the long-term relationship, as in the establishment of a core fanbase that will always be there to support you financially. Such a thing has saved plenty of devs, and such a philosophy is almost nonexistent in the console industry considering how fucking anti-consumer it has become.
So yes, he is not only suggesting a game that is demanded and given a fair polish will be well supported by the PC userbase, he is completely correct in the statement.
Look at Dragon's Dogma for instance.

Disclosure: I'm not really a gamer

[idontgno]

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.

notice we didnt say 'meaningful' changes

[nimbius]

seems like this is a once a month occurrence...and it typically goes something like this:
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. ....microsoft releases a new windows...proclaims its the greatest ever....it begins failing...
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.

Re:notice we didnt say 'meaningful' changes

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Ten years ago the company I work for wouldn't even entertain the idea of supporting and using Apple products and though I see more and more of them every day it appears even less likely today that we would move away from Microsoft anytime soon.

I think the MS "lock in" effect is fairly common because a lot of companies have mission-critical applications that only run under Windows, or they have applications that have Linux or Apple equivalents, but that would be painful or expensive to move over to.

For example, I'm sure Linux has some capable employee management applications, but transitioning from a Windows application to a Linux analogue might be difficult and time-consuming (and possibly expensive as well). It's a kind of "native lock in" that's hard to break away from. It's not that alternatives aren't available, but moving to them is usually seen as more trouble than it's worth (and that notion is probably justified, too).

As more of these kinds of applications move to the web, however, (HR, employee management, process control) I think we'll see more companies adopt Linux, because a web page works the same under any OS as long as it's written properly.

I'd bet you could sit most average users down and have them use Linux Mint or Ubuntu with hardly a hiccup as long as they were shown what to click on to open whatever it is they need to use to get their job done. If it's a web app then it's basically click-and-go, no need to retrain anyone. It's desktop apps that are the sticking point, but I suspect that may not be the case for much longer.

Re:Microsoft: Where game companies go to die

[halivar]

You have to admit; they're track record is still a helluva lot better than EA, which has pretty much crushed all my favorite franchises, ever: Maxis, Origin, Westwood, et. al.