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.
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.
I hear he's working on an even bigger, more pointless cube! (he calls it "sphere")
1. You do realize Peter Molyneux left Lionhead 4 years ago exactly to the day, right?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
2. And your god-genre-games are where again?
Sure, Molyneux, overpromises, and doesn't understand "scope" but he did give us the god-genre and gems such as with Populous, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet.
There is no need to bag on a great game designer.
Syndicate was a great game.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
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.
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.
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
Microsoft, it's where good game companies go to die.
I'd say EA gives them a good run for the money on that score.
The reason is that somehow over time most game companies turn into bad, stagnant game companies. While they're independent they have got little choice but to muddle on, usually producing worse and more derivative games as time goes on until they're just teetering on the edge. However, when a studio is part of a bigger organisation, it is easier to shut it down when it goes stagnant, shifting developers over to different studios. Once you've got a surplus of developers and a lack of good ideas, you buy another studio.
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.
He wrote populous 30 years ago then did the same game ever since. I couldn't stand the boring game but it was popular at the time. Really, his interviews, especially in the last year or so, have been a lot more fun than the games ever were. After the last one or two I wondered if he should be on suicide watch.
Sure, Molyneux, overpromises, and doesn't understand "scope" but he did give us the god-genre and gems such as with Populous, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet.
I feel like this undersells how great the team at Bullfrog was. For me, Molyneux always felt similar to John Romero - started off as part of a great team, but was significantly less impressive when put in the primary lead position.
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.
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.
Too be fair, they should never have funded Vanguard and let it rot too long.
I wasn't surprised when SOE picked them up.
Vanguard was a guaranteed failure the second that drug addict thought it up and talked MS into funding it.
That really upset me because MS had an MMO with promise that they killed off for Vanguard. I must be getting old because I can't remember the name of it.
I couldn't believe they shut down Ensemble. That game studio was great and made a ton of money.
Populous II really could have been improved with Peter Molyneux's head on a stake somewhere on the map.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
So no The Movies 2? :(
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.
EA definitely takes the cake on bad management of companies.
That's the same with most companies. The smaller the startup, the smaller and more achievable their goals. There's less code base to support, so they can concentrate on just writing new software. But then they get have to get their first product out. They make enough sales to employ more developers. Customers now want support, so they have to implement customer support engineers, technical writers, documentation, test engineers. The test harness system needs to be maintained. The more code that is added, the more code that needs to be made interoperable without breaking any builds. Testing takes longer. It might take 30 minutes to run through all automated test to make sure no check-in has broken anything.
Development teams will split into next-generation core technology development and infrastructure support. Eventually, the need for investment in equipment, conferences and development tools, that will be so much they will need to be bought out by a big company. In exchange for money, they have to restructure their staff to be compatible with the host. That will blow out the more creative engineers who liked to learn new skills and hack stuff together. Many corporations would just buy companies out and promote their staff to "ambassadors" or "sales" and "customer relations".
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Any company that has had any dealings with Mark Healey deserves to go tits up.
...
Asheron's Call?
No, they killed it before it even got to beta. You started the game out as a powerful god or something like that, instead of starting out beating on rats with a rusty sword.
It might have ended up a bad game, but by the PR and screenshots it looked promising.
That's a very good point ! Games in the 90's were not made in a vacuum. Definitely need to credit the rest of the team (programmers, designers, artists, sound, etc.)
Interesting that Molyneux is like Romero -- big on ideas but struggle to self-manage studios.
he did give us the god-genre and gems such as with Populous, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet.
Most of which promised more than they delivered. I remember how I excited was about Dungeon Keeper, then how sceptical I became after they changed course during development and turned it into a competitive DM vs. DM thing, and how utterly disappointed I was that I was right. DK was fun the first few levels when you were actually defending your dungeon against heroes, after that it was just a run-of-the-mill Aufbauspiel.
Likewise Syndicate didn't have compelling endgame. Black & White had the same, fun idea at first then it became more and more boring.
Molyneux is an idea man. I know the type, I tend into this direction as well, I've got trouble with completing and polishing things to perfection because I already have the next idea.
He brought us great ideas, but largely mediocre games.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org