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Microsoft Shutters Lionhead and Press Play games
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https://news.xbox.com/2016/03/07/microsoft-studios-changes-uk-denmark/
This is sad, but not unexpected. I was obsessed with Black & White before release, and had always wanted to work at Lionhead when it was a dynamic, creative independent company. Unfortunately they weren't ever really able to catch up with the expectations of the modern gaming public. Press Play are a company I'm afraid I'm not familiar with.
Today, I have some difficult changes to announce that affect some of our Microsoft Studios teams and projects in the UK and Denmark.
After much consideration we have decided to cease development on Fable Legends, and are in discussions with employees about the proposed closure of Lionhead Studios in the UK. Additionally, we will close Press Play Studios in Denmark, and sunset development on Project Knoxville.
These have been tough decisions and we have not made them lightly, nor are they a reflection on these development teams – we are incredibly fortunate to have the talent, creativity and commitment of the people at these studios. The Lionhead Studios team has delighted millions of fans with the Fable series over the past decade. Press Play imbued the industry with a unique creative spirit behind games like Max: The Curse of Brotherhood and Kalimba, which both captured passionate fans. 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 is sad, but not unexpected. I was obsessed with Black & White before release, and had always wanted to work at Lionhead when it was a dynamic, creative independent company. Unfortunately they weren't ever really able to catch up with the expectations of the modern gaming public. Press Play are a company I'm afraid I'm not familiar with.
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Also would have loved to take another shot at The Movies. That was a really cool concept, just had a few dumb mechanics getting in the way. But it was unique game, and I haven't ever found anything else quite lile it. I guess you could describe most of their stuff that way.
RIP Lionhead
My brother, by complete accident, ended up with a creature that would collect things and arrange them in a circle.
I mean, I did enjoy the three Fable games, but all of Lionhead's games were seriously flawed. Charming, but deeply flawed. You can get away with that for only so long.
And now I can't decide if Molyneux leaving was a good thing or a bad thing for the company. We've all heard of Molyneux grand announcements and that's just it. We've all heard of them. After he left, Lionhead went quiet. The company completely slipped from my mind. I wonder if that happened to anyone else, too.
I think they needed him and he needed them. The staff at Lionhead were clearly necessary to ground him and get his ideas to the actual execution stage (even if they were never 100% of their potential) and they needed the creative spark that he can provide. Then again, based on his ideas at his new company he may not have much left in him.
I hope the employees land on their feet. Legends must have had some major problems in development.
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The folks at Black Tusk better knock it out of the park with Gears of 4.
Don't you mean GE4RS?
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My guess is that in the age of F2P Mobas, Legends didn't have much of a chance of attracting people willing to pay 60 bucks for the game.
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
Not sure what the connection is with Coalition (which is now the name of Black Tusk, I'm pretty sure), other than publishing exclusivity--we'v had (some) footage of GOW4, on what I thought was a normal, non-bizarro development schedule (and they put out a working game already in the form of the UE). Lionhead on the other hand...I don't blame anyone for not liking their work, but frankly there didn't seem to be very much of it any time recently. Unless they had some sort of sleeper hit that went completely under my radar? What was the last thing they released?
It was a MOBA? Yeah. Nobody would buy that. People are calling Overwatch "too expensive" for being 40 bucks flat, for everything.
It was free to play. How did you think it managed to make it onto Windows in the first place?
They could possibly just be shifting to a focus on big hits for internal studios, and fill in the gaps with partnerships like Scalebound or that game with the ex-Retro people (name eludes me atm). With the partnerships, they can pick up outsiders for ideas they like and not have to deal with any goose eggs these studios might lay.
Present hints of them wanting to migrate Xbox more towards being a PC platform instead of a discrete console also help with this idea. That changes the dynamic away from the need to have a large, Sony-size (or even Nintendo-size) stable of first parties who deal with less-than-AAA fare.
I'd watch that pirate game from Rare, could lead to the same thing happening if it doesn't knock it out of the park.
Honestly I don't know if it needs anything much to replace Lionhead. Legends had zero buzz and could well have bombed hard.
Anyway, I poured hundreds of hours into Microsoft's games back in the 360 games so news like this always brings me down.
Could we say Halo is limping along? The release went smoothly, and its multiplayer has legs. Forge has been released and working, so it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere.
Honestly, it seems to be doing easily as well as Killer Instinct, if not substantially more so--then again, that's not a huge accomplishment: console first-person shooter exclusives outside of Halo are literally a joke, of the sad variety.
(Genuine question--I'm not great at calculating these sort of things.)
EDIT: Then again, Killer Instinct is going to be about as much an "exclusive" as Street Fighter V is down the line...
It's mostly just nostalgia for the old Bullfrog days, when Molyneux was actually making worthwhile games.
I think if we give an honest assessment, Lionhead produced exactly 2 games that weren't half-assed: the original Black & White, and Fable 2. The rest of the software clearly had to be shoveled out half baked due to budget overruns.
Minecraft is weird. As it stands, it's something that people buy once and then either play as is forever or mod and play forever. It'll give big bursts of income whenever it picks up people, but then they'll cease to exist as customers.
Ideally, this would have eventually resulted in a Minecraft 2, which could grab most of that same customer base all over again. But it hasn't, it's just been incremental updates to the same thing for free, even though the budget certainly should be there to make entire games from scratch.
Instead, Microsoft's (and I guess Mojang before it was bought out) strategy appears to be to try to maintain income by pushing the game into platforms that are more locked down. Intentional or not, this has the side effect of making modding impossible, and thus having DLC be the only source for additional content beyond the base game. Things that would be free and relatively trivial to implement on Java Minecraft cost money on consoles and now the Windows 10 version, while more complex changes are impossible.
It feels like Minecraft isn't being developed as much as it's a static resource that's being mined.
minecraft is being bought by new 8 year olds every (or their parents) every year, year after year. They don't need to make a minecraft 2 (at least not right now)
A quick Google search shows that Halo 5 was "the biggest launch in halo history" but no actual sales numbers were given. So whatever the sales they were most likely not up to MS's expectations.
Microsoft has also figured out how to actually turn it into an academic software resource (which is, in fact, very different than "Video game teacher buys themselves and tries to use")--something they're actually very proficient at (a lot of their old Microsoft ____ Simulator games were specifically adapted for this purpose), especially compared to Mojang I bet.
The academic software market is pretty different than the entertainment gaming juggernaut, for very specific reasons (that a lot of gamers, including those who play Minecraft, probably had a distaste for). Microsoft's always been big on educational software, so that's not at all surprising.
Of course, if that hurt Minecraft's primary development focus as video game that would suck, but I really don't know crap about that (I can't make myself play it for more than 30 minutes of a time, and then I stop for several months typically). I know that Mojang introduced a revamped fighting mechanic which is basically as huge a change as was ever officially implemented in the game's lifetime, but who knows what that means in the grand scheme of things. For all I know, the only people who still play the game are Let's Players and whatever open server is trying to complete a 1:1 scale copy of Middle Earth.
I...guess that's something? I mean, I'm not going to claim it was the biggest x of anything, but is that indication that it's limping? No offense intended, but "limping" in this industry means something rather specific (especially about the game's long term standing), which I don't think can be equated with this situation--as far as I can tell.
By the same rights, I could say Street Fighter V is limping--it managed to hit 5 at its height in the US PSN Store, but didn't make the top 20 in Europe (where Capcom counted on it to be a juggernaut), and its first week didn't match SFIV sales in Japan. There's probably a lot of room between "not setting the world on fire as hoped" and "limping", where you could find a lot better of a description than that. Or maybe I'm wrong, and SFV is limping. I really doubt that though.
The real travesty here is shuttering the studio that did Kalimba, an absolutely fantastic puzzle-platformer game that had the best co-op mode in a very, very long time.
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Then again, high fantasy settings I like tend to be the exceptions rather than the rule. I can see how someone would find the world in 2/3 very charming, but to me it just came off as annoying (even the pretty high-quality V/A work got grating fast).
I did play the shit out of Theme Hospital though--no idea if that was any of the same people besides Bullfrog Productions.
I also know there was zero information and even less chance but I always hoped out for a proper Black & White 3 and now I am pretty sure I will never see it in my life.
Yeah, that vocal style was a misstep in my view. It's not just you, I lived in England for a good chunk of my life and found the OTT regional accents joke super wearing.
That's sort of a relief--honestly the thing that might've stopped be from finishing Fable 2 was just being tired of having to listen to the dialog, but I assumed it was just the norm for the western high fantasy genre as a whole (not a lot of points of reference for me personally) and that it was only annoying to me. It went hand in hand with a very memorable, but rather off-putting art direction for me personally.
ugh lionhead, so many shattered dreams
The tagline for the entire series may well have been "Ok this time the game will be good, we promise!"