loaf of bread
Member
So now the only prominent first party studios they have are 343, Turn 10, Coalition, and Rare? Is that right or am I missing something else?
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Lionhead Studios and Press Play closed. Fable legends cancelled.
- Thread starter chadskin
- Start date
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
At the end of the day they are dedicated to making a lot of Halo games. More than any of their other IP's.
It really was. I was in the beta and was very impressed with what they had going.
A massive waste of resources and energy.
BibiMaghoo
Member
Lol. They are all Halo games. In the Halo franchise. Released annually for those listed years.
Not sure if Mojang fits?
We haven't seen Decisive's game yet, but they're probably working on Age of Empires or Rise of Nations.
The really weird part is that people might actually have been more receptive towards Fable Legends had Lionhead made Fable IV first.
+Build a userbase on XBO/W10
+Satisfy the fans who had been waiting for Fable IV since 2010
+Fill in a gap in the (exlusive) library that Xbox is missing right now (RPG)
..then they could have made Fable Legends while maybe working on DLC for Fable IV as well.
I just don't get it.
This argument is stupid. Halo wars and Spartan assault relate in name and universe to the mainline only. Yeah your technically right but the argument this tries to make is stupid.
Dash Kappei
Not actually that important
Fuck no, not Press Play! Max & The Curse of Brotherhood is the best platformer to ever grace an Xbox platforms and a great game all around, a gem which didn't do anything drastically original but managed to not be derivative and samey and also a perfect example of finding the sweet spot between B productions/downloadable games and price/content. I loved the game so much that it made my X1 purchase a bit sweeter in the long drought of good exclusives from launch till Sunset Overdrive (imo, don't jump on me). What makes it worse is that they had grown so much since Magic Marker and it was pretty clear that under MGS's wing they had found what was missing to produce and polish their content.
It's a shame really.
Of course I'm also saddened for the folks at LS and hope everyone land on their feet; not grieving for the studio itself since it's been a shell of its former self for years and two Fable games were more than enough, it was also painfully clear Legends would've bombed hard.
Damn, now I'm sad
It's a shame really.
Of course I'm also saddened for the folks at LS and hope everyone land on their feet; not grieving for the studio itself since it's been a shell of its former self for years and two Fable games were more than enough, it was also painfully clear Legends would've bombed hard.
Damn, now I'm sad
Minecraft Factory Sweden.
strikeselect
You like me, you really really like me!
Nooooooo....... I was still hoping we would see B.C. revived one of these days!!!!!
RIP Lionhead
RIP Lionhead
The Lone Courier
Member
Damn and the beta was good.
But, that'd kinda be what'd happen anyway? The difference you probably want to argue between Sony and Microsoft would be where the bar is set for an IP to be considered worth building on.
Project Gotham was considered worth building on until PGR4 happened. It being external didn't dictate that.
Halo Wars has been considered worth building on, even though they didn't feel it was worth keeping Ensemble as a whole in order to do it.
Many (most?) of Rare's stuff has been considered NOT worth building on, despite them being an internal studio.
It's not really much of a concern whether you own the studio or not. Only that you want to continue working with them. You can see this with stuff like Forza Horizon. If the studio doesn't want to continue working with you, then you're done either way, as you don't own the people that work there (e.g. Bungie, some of Rare, etc), The main difference between owning a studio and contracting one, is that if you own one, you need to have stuff for the to constantly be working on, else they're likely to get closed down. 7 years between Halo Wars games may make sense for the platform, but isn't much good for a studio specialising in RTS. Luckily Creative Assembly won't get killed after Halo Wars 2 ships, because they can return to their regular scheduled programming until Halo Wars 3 is required.
Personally, I don't think it is.
Microsoft has released so much stuff with the Halo name in the past 5 years that the franchise feels saturated.
Couple that with a poor reception with Halo 4 and a massive fiasco with The Master Chief Collection, it was no surprise when Halo 5 didn't sell quite to the standards of the franchise.
I sometimes worry about the future of Halo, specially since it's one of my favorite games... Hopefully Microsoft wakes up and realizes that their current model isn't sustainable.
I think they could have made FL a lot like the previous entries and made it shared world, too. The quest structure was bizarre to me, it killed everything about the exploration that I loved in the previous games.
Really hoping we can have a thread to talk openly about it soon. I think the majority of people will agree with the decision to not release it if there wasn't going to be regular content updates.
Mojang and minecraft is likely the biggest thing they own right now. A w10 store exclusive Minecraft and having a good touch interface for surface could do wonders for both.
Shpeshal Nick
aka Collingwood
Well if Kevin Dents recent tweet is any indication, he mentions that a studio as big as Lionhead should be selling around 7million units per game to justify their existence. So it's actually kinda surprising they've lasted this long when viewed from that perspective.
Disaster Nebraska
Banned
But they haven't done this despite plenty of opportunities. Suddenly their strategy of working with 3rd parties is the way to go, even though that's exactly what got them into trouble halfway through the Xbox 360's lifespan?
I agree with everything in your post except for the shared world stuff. No thanks. : /
Yeah. It'd be interesting if we could get a Fable Legends thread up and running at some point.
Only for the sake of an obtuse argument would someone include mobile games and a remakes as part of an "annual franchise".
thomasmahler
Member
That's the problem.
NavyPharaoh
Member
So you take a dev who has made a certain type of game and made it successful. Then you tell them make a completely different game based on where u see the market heading (F2P, MP, MicroTrans) using the same name. Then once you see the market won't look kindly on this type of game in today's climate, you close the studio down. What?
This game shouldn't have doomed a studio like Lionhead. I'm pretty sure they didn't want to make that lousy Kinect game and this game reeked of MS market research. It seems to be that their biggest failure was management, who we all know, never takes the brunt of the fall. Sad for all those that are losing their jobs making a game clearly no one wanted from the moment it was announced.
This game shouldn't have doomed a studio like Lionhead. I'm pretty sure they didn't want to make that lousy Kinect game and this game reeked of MS market research. It seems to be that their biggest failure was management, who we all know, never takes the brunt of the fall. Sad for all those that are losing their jobs making a game clearly no one wanted from the moment it was announced.
Max is still one of the best GWG's they have given away to date. I was disappointed when they were doing that "choose your game" thing and Max 2 wasn't an option
No one should feel over saturated because of remakes and PC f2p titles.
Or an rts game. If they were making shooting games like cod it'd be another story but they are not doing that.
Are you telling me if we got kotor 3, good battlefront 4, Jedi knight, and a rogue one arcade game people would complain about over saturation?
Also OT.
Corral bro keep your head up!
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
It's just gonna further tarnish Microsoft's rep with indie devs.
thomasmahler
Member
I don't have any info there, but I don't think that's what MS does. I'd assume that Lionhead had enough freedom to decide over what games they wanted to make. It rarely happens that a publisher straight out tells the developer what kinda game should be developed next (apart from the obvious Call of Duty, Forza, etc. studios that are pretty much committed to make just that). I might be completely wrong on that and they might do stuff like that to AAA studios, but I'd just be very surprised. Motivation would automatically be at an extreme-low, if you don't allow developers to come up with their own vision. I'm sure once you land a huge hit like a 'Halo', Microsoft would definitely want the dev to make another sequel, but in the case with Lionhead, I wouldn't be surprised if those decisions weren't made by MS, but by upper management at Lionhead themselves.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Molyneux was a huge fan of Kinect and he might have put that into production after seeing a prototype he liked or whatever. Since this is all NDA'd, I guess we'll never know what actually happened.
1. It appears saturated because it's the same genre over and over again. Nothing new is put to the table, whereas your Star Wars example is a RPG, a FPS, a thirdperson action game, and an arcade game.
2. Not that this is a direct counter argument, but Star Wars has a lot deeper lore and flexibility in what themes and experiences the universe allows for. Halo is basically just dudes in motorbike helmets shooting at overly serious Dreamworks aliens.
Oh my god did you just come for halo's lore and say its not deep?
And how the hell is an RTS a fps. And a top-down arcade shooter the same?
This is my fear as well. : /
This is the job description of an Xbox boss in Europe from 2012 to 2015:
Look at what their European studios are/were working on in that period:
Lionhead: Fable Legends (went from single-player games to F2P games as a service)
Rare: Sea of Thieves (Shared world multiplayer game. It was an upgrade from kinect duty, I suppose)
Press Play: Project Knoxville (went from single player games to multiplayer game)
Mojang: Minecraft
I am a huge fan of both star wars and halo universes. If you seriously think that star wars has deeper lore you are out of your mind.
element
Member
I think that is one thing being lost in many posts, especially the ones that bring up classic franchises like Crimson Skies, MechAssult, Kameo, Perfect Dark. The cost of making games is SOOOO much larger now than it was when those games were made. You could make a game for well under $10m back then, while now it is pretty challenging, especially from an internal studio. When you are investing $25m $30m on development alone, your sales through number needs to be 600k to break even just on the development budget, let alone additional aspects like marketing. And like I said in a previous post, companies are more likely to invest heavily in something they will make HUGE profits on. As crazy as it sounds, companies this size would rather spend $100m to make $1b, than spend $10m to make $100m.
Fans voted for which game they would make. Though all the other titles had multiplayer aspect to them. Note Kalimba was very much a multiplayer game!
Too many pages to go through, but as an interesting historical sidenote (and hopefully as a piece of information that goes to prove that game business is very hard), even back in GDC'10 Lionhead revealed that they realistically needed Fable 3 to sell over 5 million units: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/11/fable-2-sold-3-5-million-copies-lionhead-needs-5-million-for/
That's a tough number when you factor that the first did I believe around 3 million across two platforms and the second 3.5 million on one platform. Then you have a major step-up in production costs with the XBO so business-wise it doesn't necessarily come as a huge surprise, though I would have assumed that keeping some of the key talent would have been a good decision. Let's see what happens, but it's definitely a sad day.
That's a tough number when you factor that the first did I believe around 3 million across two platforms and the second 3.5 million on one platform. Then you have a major step-up in production costs with the XBO so business-wise it doesn't necessarily come as a huge surprise, though I would have assumed that keeping some of the key talent would have been a good decision. Let's see what happens, but it's definitely a sad day.
Yes, thank you. It's easy to think of what could've been, but at the same time I do reckon that MS at least thought that these franchises didn't have enough potential to grow into major franchises. Fable showed potential with it's growth, but at the same time the 3 iteration didn't do well at all and MS most likely wanted to try another service model where the high production costs and risky productions could be combated with a steady revenue source (which is why some of the leading mobile studios can make multiple projects that never see the light of day and find success by committing to only the best of the best).
Monocle
Member
Yeah, I really wish they'd made Fable 4.
AncientDiety
Banned
Kevin Dent is a nut case, do not believe anything he says.
CollectedDust
Member
I really didn't see this coming. I assumed Fable Legends would flop, at which point a closure could be feasible. But this? Wow
element
Member
I'd tend to agree, but his math on this is close (probably a little high), but very much in the ballpark.
CrispyBoar
Banned
Everyone should pay attention & read this post if they haven't already. It's very informative.
The writing has been on the wall.
Pretty much. I haven't enjoyed anything they've made recently, but still hate to see them close down.
sixteen-bit
Member
Sad to see a studio close. Hope everyone lands on their feet.
Bitch Pudding
Member
Genuinely curious if this is just a single, independent strategic decision or if it's part of a larger strategy, concerning all MS studios. Thing is, I understand that they cancelled Fable Legends, but closing a whole studio, that's something else, especially given MS' scarcity of 1st party studios.
Given other recent developments, it seems like MS is incrementally (pun intended) saying goodbye to console games development. But well, guess we'll know soon enough.
But this develepment is most certainly no grist for the mill of a new XBOX hardware (upgrade).
Given other recent developments, it seems like MS is incrementally (pun intended) saying goodbye to console games development. But well, guess we'll know soon enough.
But this develepment is most certainly no grist for the mill of a new XBOX hardware (upgrade).