Fable Legends cancelled while Lionhead Studios will soon be closed
It's a sad day for fans of Lionhead Studios.
Microsoft has announced it has cancelled Fable Legends and is in the process of closing Lionhead Studios. The company will also be closing Press Play Studios and ending the development on Project Knoxville.
In a statement published on Xbox Wire, Microsoft says these changes are taking effect "as Microsoft Studios continues to focus its investment and development on the games and franchises that fans find most exciting and want to play." This leads us to believe Microsoft didn't think there was enough "excitement" for Fable Legends when compared to its bigger AAA franchises, like the Halo series.
Fortunately, Xbox assures the gaming community it's committed to working closely with those affected by today's news to help find them new opportunities at Xbox or help place them in jobs elsewhere in the games industry if they like.
Lionhead Studios was founded in 1996 and released its first game, Black & White, in 2001. The studio then went on to work on the original Fable in 2004, Black & White 2 and The Movies in 2005, and were acquired by Microsoft in April 2006. Under Microsoft, Lionhead Studios went on to work exclusively on the Fable series as Fable II released in 2008, and Fable III released in 2010. The studio also worked on an Xbox Live Arcade Fable Heroes game, and the Kinect-enabled Fable: The Journey.
Fable Legends was announced back in August 2013 as an Xbox One exclusive, but several months later was announced to be a free-to-play title for both Microsoft’s console and PC. We also learned Fable Legends is the reason why there wasn’t a Fable 4 yet. With today’s news, we have a feeling there won’t ever be a Fable 4.
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replyDaniel Perez posted a new article, Fable Legends cancelled while Lionhead Studios will soon be closed
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What is going on at Microsoft? Especially after the Spring even it sounds like they are about to make a big withdraw or scale back in the games market.
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This combined with the proposed yearly cycle of Xbox revisions
Please clarify?-
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I was under the impression the XBox One has not had any hardware revision at all, just packaged upgrades like the larger hard drive.
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There doesn't appear to be much to base this on. The XBox One hasn't had revisions because it hasn't been as bug-laden and fraught with engineering issues as the XBox 360, but shrinks are always likely because the less material needed the more they can fabricate, etc. So the tangible package "upgrades" (hard disk, special edition controller, etc.) are all we've had so far.
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I mean revisions in any sense of the word. You might think that a bigger storage device is a revision. It is certainly an upgrade, but I cannot in good conscience call that anything like a revision. As for revisions that are "more dramatic," making for a more powerful console... well good luck getting anybody to care about your platform when they can't be sure if their console can do all of the XYZ features of game ABC in the future. Fragmenting a market that, by its nature, doesn't like fragmentation is bad. The PC Engine is pretty well the only exception where a highly expandable console also happened to be a successful one, and the upgrades that were available for that console, as awesome as they were, still managed to show the shortcomings of a complete redesign, IOW, I just don't believe you are going to see a better, stronger, faster XBox One at all. The very idea just goes to against the ingrained experiences that marketing has taught year after year.
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Ok, but their "tape out the hardware and don't change it for eight years" strategy doesn't work either. Developers went nuts when there wasn't next-gen hardware for their new games when they figured there would be by now.
I think what's going to happen is in a couple of years Xbox Two is going to come out and it'll play all the Xbone games as well as new Xbtwo games, and it can do so because of the UWP platform thing. There won't be a new hardware release every 6-8 months, there won't be a "is mine good enough to run it?" situation and there won't be some concern because it's all named Xbox One. But Microsoft is not king of the world this round and they might not want to wait eight years before trying again. -
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When their status quo is updating hardware every six months due to overheating failure, this is a good thing. I just don't see a magical go-against-the-grain XBox 1.1, it's way too... stupid?
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If they can't support it because the sales are just way too low, then the thing to do is to Sega Saturn it, just dump it completely and do it early. But I can't believe things are that bad. The biggest problems that the XB1 have had were entirely image related, marketing fumbles, and the thing about marketing is, it's easy to fix. If crap messaging is really what is holding you back, then the right messaging might turn it around. If it doesn't turn it around, there is maybe a 50% chance out wasn't really (or only) the marketing that was the problem.
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I'd be willing to bet that either
a) he was referring to future consoles being able to run the previous systems' games due to UWP (instead of what we have now where the Xbone on day one can't run any 360 games) but not that they're going to make iterative consoles any time soon, or
b) he meant exactly that but some other division of Microsoft will shut that down soon. Remember how many mixed messages came out of Microsoft in the run-up to Windows 10's release
There's also a fringe theory that this is effectively Microsoft bowing out of the console hardware business (i.e., taping out hardware and sticking to it for years) and instead just making TV-focused closed multimedia PC's.
In any event I don't think what they're going to do is as drastic as people think it sounds.-
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Microsoft has for a while now been in the position Apple is finding themselves in where when they had a product no one had and everyone needed they were making a ton of money every year based on just filling a need alone. Few people owned a PC, everyone went and bought one, Microsoft's OS was on all of them, now everyone has one. No one owned a tablet, Apple makes the iPad, everyone buys one, now sales have leveled off because everyone has one.
So Microsoft needs to find the next no-one-has-it-everyone-needs-it thing and they figured if everyone has a TV then sell them something to hook up to a TV. Today a $35 Chromecast can do Netflix but people forget that the first thing to stream Netflix was the 360. Microsoft's original goal with the Xbox was to get a device connected to everyone's TV set. So it makes sense that the first one was a traditional game console, the second one tries to branch out more and the third one tries to be the center of your digital universe that also happens to play games. Problem is the Xbone suffered in trying to be a jack of all trades and few people wanted to pay an extra $100 to have Microsoft cameras in their home or be able to talk to their TV, meanwhile Sony starts snapping up better console exclusives. And for years now Microsoft has been seeing their OS sales eroding thanks to tablets and smartphones to the point where they thought a tablet-focused OS was a good idea and now they're having to give away Windows 10 to make it appealing to people (fwiw, Win10 actually is pretty good overall).
So yeah, Microsoft's in a weird spot right now. Not to say they're failing or flailing but when you lay off thousands of users and then pay Notch $2B for Minecraft somethings up.-
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Core 2 processors has been the killer for many PC companies be it software or hardware.
Windows10 and most current software for business and beyond works fine on the processors so people do not need to buy new hardware which limits MS OS sales and also ongoing sales from PC vendors.
My PC upgrade cycle has changed from a PC every 2 years to half a PC every 2 years and many companies have turned 4 year upgrade cycles to 6 year minimum.
I believe that PC manufacturers have lost about 20% of their sales in the last 4 years as people make minor upgrades to Multi core PCs rather than buy new systems and it will only get worse until something special like quantum computing comes along.
For too many years bastardised Moores law kept us upgrading but that has come to a grinding halt.
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My guess is they didn't want to start up a new project at Lionhead and it was easier to just shut the studio down and eat the sunk development costs of Fable, than to lay off people at the studio.
It seems to me more than Microsoft scaling back they are going to focus on a new console launch, much the same way they did with the original Xbox in cutting it's life short. And also leveraging the fact that the only other place to play AAA games besides the consoles is the PC which they own as well.
Microsoft is still in the middle of shifting from a software company to a devices and services company. And are building a universal platform. So you will be able to go in to a store and buy your $150-200 Xbox One set top box to play games with less fidelity than the $300-400 Xbox One v2 (w Oculus support), or get the best graphics on your $1000 PC, or $1500 Surface. All running Windows 10.
Then in 3 years you get your Xbox One v3. And be able to buy your Roku style $50 Xbox One that can play all of the Xbox One, and Xbox One v2 games but not the games tailor built for Xbox One v3. But by that time you will also have your x86 Windows Phone that can play Xbox One games as well. -
My guess is, like Command and Conquer Generals 2, their analytics showed they were never actually going to make any money off it.
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They're doubling-down on their commitment to PC-gaming.
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I think the install base of Xbox and PC makes up a giant part of the gaming market. compared to PS4.
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I don't think Satya Nadella sees MS as an entertainment company. He seems to be slowly walking back a lot of the moves Ballmer made. I wouldn't be shocked if in 5 years there is no more Xbox/Windows Phone/Surface divisions at MS.
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Gee, people weren't excited about a F2P Fable spin-off? Who would've thought?
There's no way they don't know damn well that Fable fans would be excited about a *real* Fable game coming to XBO (and PC, ideally).-
Yeah make an actual Fable game and do it properly.
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People thought that about Age of Empires as well, and were really confused when Microsoft shut down Ensemble Studios.
Years later former Ensemble devs in interviews admitted that the games had not been selling nearly as well as people thought. That's why those two guys left early to form Newtoy and make Words with Friends - they saw the writing on the wall.
It's possible Lionhead has been circling the drain for a while now.
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Agreed. A proper Fable sequel would make me go out and buy an XBO... if, that is, it wasn't coming to PC as well. Most of those games have. Assuming that wasn't a possibility, a Fable 4 or equivalent would justify the cost of a console for me.
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Yup. That's what I've been thinking since launch.
But now that it seems like most of the games are coming to PC anyway, I'll probably never have a reason to get one.
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Exactly. A proper Fable 4 would be awesome.
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They should have made a Fable 4 instead of a connect game no one wanted and Legends a game no one wanted.
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lol, does anyone ever use Kinect at all now?
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