Sweeping Changes At Microsoft Studios Kill Lionhead Studios and Fable (betanews.com) 91
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.
Fable 2 PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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Choosing to release on console rather than PC may affect popularity. Fable always struck me as a game that was less good because of the need to accept console limitations.
Re:Fable 2 PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
It sucks that Dredd wasn't the R-rated comic book movie to start that trend.
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Never saw Dredd. Watchmen would have been a good candidate too.
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Always though that Dredd would have made a great TV series if they picked the best stories from the 2000AD comic magazine.
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Are you suggesting there is more money to be made developing for the PC? Are you smoking crack?
Well, it seems developing for the console wasn't enough to keep them alive, so.... all we can say for certainty about this studio is that the console market is not enough to keep them afloat.
Had they ported to PC, there is a non-zero chance that it may have been a PC-hit, enough to keep them afloat. We have evidence that there was a zero chance of staying afloat purely on console sales.
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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
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All about money. Where the PC kills consoles is in long term sales, where the PC game price is actually lower than the console licensing fee, let alone paying for the game, hence crippling discounting on consoles. There are games I have bought on discount from steam that I have yet to play, months after purchasing them. I picked up Elite Dangerous and am not going to play it until I get around to picking up a steam controller because I want to experience that way from the start, bought on discount, no rush
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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.
Nothing of Value was Lost (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nothing of Value was Lost (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
Do they now have budget to revive ACES? (Score:2)
Flight Simulator is sorely missed guys.
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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.
I hope Peter Molyneux never works again (Score:1)
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I hear he's working on an even bigger, more pointless cube! (he calls it "sphere")
Re:I hope Peter Molyneux never works again (Score:5, Informative)
1. You do realize Peter Molyneux left Lionhead 4 years ago exactly to the day, right?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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.
Re: I hope Peter Molyneux never works again (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Populous II really could have been improved with Peter Molyneux's head on a stake [wikia.com] somewhere on the map.
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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.
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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 id
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Disclosure: I'm not really a gamer (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [venturebeat.com]
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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.
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Microsoft: Where game companies go to die (Score:1)
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.
Re:Microsoft: Where game companies go to die (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 anoth
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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, th
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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.
Re: Microsoft: Where game companies go to die (Score:1)
Asheron's Call?
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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.
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I couldn't believe they shut down Ensemble. That game studio was great and made a ton of money.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:notice we didnt say 'meaningful' changes (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Yeah Azure and o365 are selling by the virtual cloud based truckload.
They've already got AzureAD and it's shaping up to be a complete replacement for windows server in SMB environments. A soon as they get their head out of their ass and put it together in an easy point and drool package (Basically they need to gut onedrive and make it actually do what business users need to do and make AzureAD able to replace winserver wholesale, then bundle it with a remote management tool that's not a huge pain in the di
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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.
Re:notice we didnt say 'meaningful' changes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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A little more than that when you add up Windows, Office, Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, Skype, and a boat load of other MS products it suddenly becomes one stop for support. Now you are no longer looking at business critical applications that interact with software from various vendors the buck stops at MS and they support it.
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Linux may have alternatives to just about everything MS but the problem is it's a lot of third parties and no one vendor to point your finger at and say we payed for it now fix it.
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Never, ever going to happen. It's been a decade and a half since the Internet took off and web apps are still "write once, suck anywhere" thanks to the limitations of HTML and the differences between allegedly standards-compliant browsers.
Bullshit. The vast, vast majority of web applications work perfectly well under any modern browser.
Ever heard of Facebook? SalesForce.com? Twitter? Pinterest? Instagram? Wikipedia? Amazon? YouTube? Google? Linkedin? Ebay?
They all work just fine with any browser that isn't 100 years old. Stop with the bullshit FUD.
How much $$$$? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Many, many, many games and ideas are scrapped before they become complete products. Obviously the game was not progressing like it should along with failures in the past so they shut it down. It takes about 5 years to bring a good MMO to market and they were still 1-2 years out.
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Many, many, many games and ideas are scrapped before they become complete products. Obviously the game was not progressing like it should along with failures in the past so they shut it down. It takes about 5 years to bring a good MMO to market and they were still 1-2 years out.
No, I understand that....but still, it seems like a huge waste. Either commit to something or don't. I know the "sunk cost"fallacy is a huge problem but nonetheless, game development isn't some new, untried process. Either they're not doing it right or they have no idea how to do it at all. It's not like this is magic or some unknown quantity. I understand there are a *lot* of variables in play as well as unforeseen circumstances, but it just seems as though the failure rate is unreasonably high for this ki
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Meh, their taxes are so high they just write it off or write it down - if it's already covered and they can not reduce their tax burden any further then they just defer it or push it to a "wholly owned subsidiary" that is in a different country and reduce their burden there. They have (and continue to make) gobs of cash and have a whole lot of assets.
Uhh (Score:1)
On the plus side the staff can just move en-masse to a Starbucks of their choice and start up again as co-owners.
Re:Uhh (Score:4, Funny)
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Own? I'm talking about running a games studio from a table =)
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Way too late (Score:4, Interesting)
Kinesthetic Killed It (Score:2)
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.
R.I.P. (Score:2)
Good (Score:2)