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

[WillAffleckUW]

Have to agree. If they had ported the Fable 2 PC port, or made a Fable Linux port, they might have had a chance.

I'd say half of my game purchases this century have been Lionhead games.

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.

Nothing of Value was Lost

[bigdady92]

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.

Re:Nothing of Value was Lost

[Kobun]

Agreed. Lionhead was full of disappointment for me. Black & White, which has performance degradation bugs that make the game unplayable on a 10-years-later modern PC. Fable 3, with game-ending bugs (shooting range, anyone?) that were never fixed. The Fable 2 PC port that never came. Either Black & White, with their suicidally stupid AI.

I would feel differently if the games were such that I could go back and play them today with fond nostalgia, but their never-addressed quality issues make the whole endeavor too much of an unfun hassle.

Re:Nothing of Value was Lost

[Dutch Gun]

I'd have rather seen them make some effort at getting things turned around rather than putting it on a chopping block, but maybe it was beyond that point. I've been there, as part of a failing studio that went under. It's not fun at all, but competent devs should be able to get new jobs without trouble - experienced specialists are always in demand. So, you can say that I've got a bit of professional empathy for those guys.

There comes a point, however, when it's foolish to throw good money after bad, and it seems like that may be the case with Lionhead. I've been disappointed with them for many years now. The Fable franchise, while decent, has *never* lived up to what it really could have been, and this is from somewhat who absolutely loves all things RPG. For whatever reason, there was something at that studio that's been holding back the potential of those games. I've been in studios like that, and unfortunately, it's often not a problem with the general work force, but people in leadership positions that insists on meddling with game design and making bad decisions, sometimes obviously, but sometimes in fairly subtle ways. But it's pretty difficult to spot those things from the outside.

To give you one example: I was on a team with a project manager that had never worked in the game industry before, but he insisted on a number of really stupid design decisions, viewing them as "cost-saving measures", as they would tend to simplify development. His brilliant idea? All the enemies in the game would use the same basic attack code, and we'd just swap out art assets and tweak numbers to make them unique-looking. Naturally, the publisher realized the game played like shit, and we ended up having to completely redesign and rewrite that portion of the game. I was doing AI, so the re-designed forced a massive rewrite of my code, of course. As a result, the game ultimately ended up behind schedule and presumably over-budget, largely thanks to a bone-headed design decision from a non-game-designer put in charge of the game. The company was rife with stupid interference from above like this.

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.

Re:Disclosure: I'm not really a gamer

[Carewolf]

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.

It is only fitting, all the greatest studios have been killed by the company that bought them. Just to meantion the two biggest: Origin and Microprose. It was worse for Lucas Arts who was allowed to rot first after the take over before being put out of its missery.

Re:I hope Peter Molyneux never works again

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear he's working on an even bigger, more pointless cube! (he calls it "sphere")

Re:I hope Peter Molyneux never works again

[UnknownSoldier]

1. You do realize Peter Molyneux left Lionhead 4 years ago exactly to the day, right?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

On 7 March 2012, Molyneux announced that he would be leaving Lionhead and Microsoft â" after the completion of Fable: The Journey â" to begin work at a company founded by former Lionhead Studios CTO Tim Rance called 22Cans.

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.

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]

and the only thing using the microsoft cloud is the colocational datacenter racks that hold it up.

Of everything you wrote, this is the only point I'd differ on. The Azure cloud stuff has actually been pretty successful, to the point where they can barely meet demand. (Personally I don't see why, because AWS seems to be a better platform in nearly every way.)

So Azure has actually been a money-maker so far, but other than that everything you said was spot-on.

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.

Re:Microsoft: Where game companies go to die

[Zephyn]

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.

Re:Uhh

[__aaclcg7560]

Why would anyone want to co-own a Starbucks?

Re: I hope Peter Molyneux never works again

[Threni]

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.

Re:I hope Peter Molyneux never works again

[Kobun]

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.

Way too late

[poisonborz]

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.

R.I.P.

[grimfate]

So no The Movies 2? :(