Microsoft Shutters Lionhead and Press Play games

tastydonuts

Doesn't really seem like much of a surprise that Microsoft wants to keep the franchise alive in some way. Though it'd probably run into the same problem as Fable Legends did: it's not Fable 4.

Hopefully it'll get the support it needs as a kickstarted project.

Local H Jay

Honestly they should just pull back in Molyneux since Godus is a huge mess, and then force him to make Black & White 3.

Archsorcerer

Chaining him to a desk is gonna bring about an excellent game? Molyneux is not that kind of guy.

Best case scenario you end up with another Bioshock: Infinite with plenty of people fired from their jobs.

It's like forcing Morrissey to make songs for Disney.

And I doubt that many people are interested in such sequel. B&W is no Mario or Zelda.

Local H Jay

I meant more like keep him in check, he has great ideas but doesn't execute well. He needs people to say no to him every now and then, or else you end up with another Godus situation.

tastydonuts

What ever happened to what's his face after they did that? It's like he completely vanished.

Molyneux coming back to Microsoft wouldn't do much positive for either party either, imo.

Local H Jay

I am way more interested in a new B&W than any Fable game, that's for sure.

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Local H Jay

Fair enough. He should just scrap Godus and start over, it seems like they have lost a lot of goodwill following the Cube and Godus that people are going to be even more skeptical of his stuff in the future.

Maybe after the team handling Halo Wars 2 finished they could make a small scale B&W spin off. I really enjoyed the game From Dust, something that controlled and played like that would be great.

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Local H Jay

I saw the bit about them hiring a fan and backer as a team lead which is basically a huge red flag

Hopefully they can recover because at this point they are likely hemorrhaging money

cloudeagle

Aegeri wrote: »

As far as I'm aware, Godus is mostly mothballed and has a team of people fiddling with it (at best). 22cans is working on some kind of other game at the moment. There's a decent write up of the complete mess here.

Ah yes, that was almost a year ago.

Let's hope he's working on something legitimately awesome, because after the Godus fiasco and fucking over the dude who won the Curiosity thing, he's pretty much got zero goodwill left.

JasmineJasmine

I wasn´t interested in the game, i would have prefered a traditional fable instead, but this is way too much worst, darn it, i did like the series a lot. Hopefully other dev team might be involved in the future, hope it is rare. Wonder the reasons for this, God knows Microsoft needs all their dev teams, and then some.

tastydonuts

Interesting read from Polygon from someone who was working on the first Fable (from Big Blue Box / Lionhead).

...Also, unlike when I taught myself, my learning was now under the scrutiny of others. I felt so far out of my depth that, for a while, I genuinely feared my trial period would end badly. It felt like a hobby club: a place where a bunch of guys could have fun doing what they loved and get paid for it. We were all friends, and the office was full of banter, laughing and joking. People would zoom up and down the office on scooters, often stopping by someone’s desk to say hi and chat for a bit.

This seemed like a warning sign in retrospect. The atmosphere was too relaxed and jovial — work was getting done but there was not really much sense of an end point. The dates mentioned as deadlines were almost spoken of with smirks and laughter: We made jokes about them rather than treating them as anything that might be worth the worry. We felt invincible. With Lionhead, Peter Molyneux and Microsoft in your corner, what could go wrong?

What indeed?

Full Article

urahonky

darleysam wrote: »

Hey, there's a cool thing that's happening
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2016/05/30/ex-lionhead-developers-bringing-secret-fable-card-game-to-kickstarter

IGN can reveal that Lionhead was secretly developing a free-to-play, Fable-branded digital card game, Fable Fortune, for 18 months before the studio’s closure - and now it’s headed to Kickstarter.

Flaming Fowl Studios is a new indie developer co-founded by Lionhead veterans Craig Oman, Mike West and Marcus Lynn and set up to finish the game its creators started. Microsoft has given the team its backing to continue to use the Fable license but, now without a publisher behind it, Flaming Fowl has turned to crowdfunding to complete the project.

The game begins its Kickstarter campaign tomorrow, Tuesday May 31 at 3pm BST / 10am ET / 7am PT. The team hope to raise at least £250,000 in four weeks, with multiple stretch goals planned beyond that.

Flaming Fowl expects Fortune will be ready for a closed beta within a few weeks of the end of the campaign, an open beta on PC and Xbox One in October, with a full release to follow late in 2017.

So, what is it?

Fortune will be immediately familiar to those who play the likes of Hearthstone - with players choosing from eight planned deck-altering heroes and aiming to reduce opponents’ health to zero using a variety of spell types - but comes with its own twists.

According to West, the team’s ethos is “improving the genre”, which includes using a more engaging 3D art style, offering a full online co-op mode against AI “bosses” using themed decks, a leveling system for cards used regularly, and Trophy Cards, extra units or spells offered to the player who plays second.

It equally looks to appeal to fans of the series from which it takes its name. Drawing on characters, locations and even in-jokes from throughout Fable history - including using lost character concepts never before seen in the games - Fortune aims to be a full translation of Fable to the CCG format, British humour and all.

It even builds familiar Fable-like elements into its game’s structure - completing mid-match “quests” like casting certain types of card or spending enough mana will allow you to make a good or evil choice, transforming your hero, their powers, and even morphing certain cards into new forms.

The game’s design is far from complete, however. “We’re looking to build this game with the fans,” explains West, “and then potentially morph and change things about the game over time. This is our starting position - we need to find out what people want from a CCG, and we’re ready to talk to them.

West brings up the possibility of adding limited, draft-style play, 2v2 PvP modes, single player campaigns and more. Kickstarter backers will gain access to closed forums where those discussions can take place.
Originally pitched by West 8 years ago to be a part of Fable 2, Fortune began development in 2014, in partnership with London developer Mediatonic.

During that time, a team of 20 created the core design. Once Lionhead’s closure was announced, the team switched focus to create a playable prototype, which will form the basis of the upcoming closed beta, and which we saw played in our discussion with the developers.

Recently, reports emerged that Microsoft wouldn't sell Lionhead to prospective buyers because it didn’t want to part with the Fable license - it seems that, at least partially, Fable Fortune is the reason for that. Microsoft’s willingness to allow Fable’s own developers to use the license at least indicates that the console giant doesn’t want to leave the franchise dormant, but offer fans a continued relationship with the series:

“I think this is something that Fable fans are going to enjoy,” says Oman. “We’re definitely very keen to keep giving them new and interesting things. We have the ability to add new creatures and characters to this game and the world of Albion. I think we can certainly give them that Fable fix that they’ll be looking for.”

As West puts it: “If you want a Fable game, at the moment, this is your Fable game.”

To find out more about Flaming Fowl, visit the studio's website - we'll update this story tomorrow with a link to the project's Kickstarter.

There's a video and some images on that article, but also about a hundred different ads and visual clutter, and good heavens did my browser take a dive even just trying to copy that text across. I'm so glad I don't visit IGN regularly.

edit: sorry if this is a strawman.

I'm just not sure that this can be any fun... Of all the things to do to a Fable game... A CCG? Really?

Unco-ordinated

Kotaku have just put up an article that focuses more on Lionhead's closure but also touches on Microsoft corporate, Windows 10 and a few other things. I'll quote the more interesting parts of it:
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/06/09/how-fable-legends-took-down-lionhead

“I thought I was going to be working on a single-player game, a more advanced version of Fable 3,” says one source. “But when they went to get that game approved, the three senior designers who were pitching it were told that ‘you will not be given permission to make Fable 4, or something that is a shadow Fable 4’. Phil Harrison’s vision for all of his studios in Europe was now for service-based games. That’s what he thought was the future of games. He didn’t want to make anything that was a £50 box, fire and forget. He wanted long tails of revenue, even if there was a smaller up-front burst of revenue.”

“Harrison had a vision for the future where everything was games as a service,” says another. “I think many parts of Microsoft really struggled with that approach, despite the fact that Windows 10 was going in that direction. Harrison absolutely did not want a boxed product.”

If Lionhead did not follow Harrison’s new direction, what was it going to do? Fable Legends was the game that they had to make. And though not everyone at Lionhead was on board, they were going to make the best of it.

“We go into it with our eyes open, and we try to make the best of it, with the awareness that it was a different kind of title,” says a former Lionhead employee. “Culturally it was a challenge. We had to change the company, we had to invest in new types of skills that we hadn’t got before: product managers, community people, business managers and service engineers… all the stuff that goes with a free-to-play game.”

“The studio was mostly behind it – by process of elimination,” says another. “We shed 10 per cent of our staff in the first year. Those were the people that rejected it outright.”

Much of the reluctance, says a source, was down to the fact that what Legends was attempting was not only new for the studio, but altogether new. It felt risky to some, even then. “It was a tough time, but an interesting time,” they say. “Even on the leadership level, there were people who were quite old school: they were used to what they were used to, which was boxed retail products. Within the team and within Lionhead there was a number of people that just loved making those games. The idea of moving away from that scared them. It was pretty much always planned to be free-to-play, and the idea of free-to-play scared a lot of people really early on. It was synonymous with Facebook and rip-off Skinner boxes. I guess things like League were around at that point, but certainly a lot of the members of the team weren’t that familiar with it.”

The core problem wasn’t with the game’s design. The core problem was that Fable Legends was much, much too expensive for what it was. Fable Legends could have worked as a small-to-medium-scale free-to-play game, if it had been released quickly and iterated upon well. But with every adjustment to the Xbox division’s corporate team, Microsoft’s changing priorities created a very dangerous situation for Lionhead.

“The game was pitched to Harrison as a medium-scale game, a AA game. It was supposed to be out significantly earlier; it would have been last summer,” says a source. “But the size of the game just kept growing, and the fidelity value of the game kept growing. And that was because we were the servant of two masters. We reported to Phil Harrison, the master of Europe, but we also had another person that he does not report to: Phil Spencer [head of the Xbox division]. And he wants a beautiful AAA quality experience that he can use to sell Xbox Ones. So now we’re making a free-to-play game that’s as expensive as an AAA game. Very dangerous.”

“The original pitch was for a really cheap game – it certainly wasn’t the $75m we ended up spending,” corroborates another source. “There were going to be three phases of release. But as time wore on, there were various voices that made it more complicated. For example, Spencer was very keen on having the Fable features: it was crucial that it could be played single player, for instance that was suddenly a big important thing. It was also supposed to be “the prettiest ever online game” – that was Harrison, he wanted it to be prettier than anything else out there.

“The cost was considerable. It was a big, big game. Art was a lot of it, audio was a lot of it, but there was quite a large engineering team – in part because pretty much everything we created had to work within an multiplayer environment and client-server environment. We had to invest a lot of time and effort on anti-cheat things to prevent hackers from screwing over our balance. There was a lot of infrastructure work – we needed to create new systems, some of which didn’t exist within Microsoft, around analytics (your life-blood for a F2P game, the key to understanding players and their behaviour).”

So here was Lionhead, making an experimental free-to-play game that was quickly becoming as expensive as any major first-party game you could work on. It would have to be very successful to succeed.

It was around this time that Microsoft came up with a new priority for Fable Legends: Xbox One and Windows 10 cross-play. There is reportedly an initiative within Microsoft, codenamed Helix, that centres around Windows convergence; the eventual aim is for all of Microsoft’s products to run the same software. In the shorter term, all Xbox One games were to be adapted to run on Windows 10 as well. Fable Legends was to be the first game that would do this.

This would take more time and money – and it wasn’t the only showcase feature that Microsoft asked for over the course of Legends’ development. Fable Legends was also to support DX12; back in 2013, it had to make use of the cloud and Smartglass, Microsoft’s ill-fated second-screen initiative. But it was the Windows 10 cross-play that proved the most damaging demand, because it would greatly restrict Fable Legends’ potential audience if the game were only to be available on PC through the Windows Store. Originally, the plan was for Legends to release through Steam – but the Windows/Xbox convergence strategy put an end to that.

“When we started the project we weren’t aware of Windows 10,” says a source. “We were going to ship on Xbox One initially and then we wanted to come out on PC at a later point, most likely though Steam. But we got burnt quite badly.”

“Without Steam, without other platforms, it was just painful,” says another. “The Windows Store is a giant disaster. It’s on fire. 98% of PC copies of Rise of the Tomb Raider, a flagship Windows 10 game, were bought on Steam. The same is true for Minecraft. That hurt us, too. The store’s a mess; the number of people who couldn’t even install the game from the Microsoft store was… significant.”

Besides the technical problems with Windows 10, though, Lionhead’s bigger problem was that for the entirety of Fable Legends’ development cycle, the potential audience for the game was shrinking. Xbox One sales were falling far short of projections. Windows 10 installs, too, were nowhere near what Microsoft had planned. The scale just wasn’t there. And for a free-to-play game, scale is everything.

“Let’s be honest – we make our projections based on a series of assumptions,” reflects a former employee who worked closely with Microsoft. “There are supposed to be 2x as many Xboxes out there as there are right now. There are supposed to be 2x as many Windows 10 installs as there currently are. So now, when we look at how much money Legends could make in the free-to-play universe, you have to halve it. Because we can only reach half the audience that was projected.”

There were those at Lionhead who knew that Legends was turning into an increasingly dangerous project. But nobody that I spoke to thought that Microsoft would actually shut the studio down. The worst-case scenario was that Fable Legends could be disassembled, and all the beautiful art, audio, characters, creatures and environments could be used to build a more traditional, single-player Fable 4. But Microsoft decided to just cut its losses.

“There was always a scenario where Fable Legends wasn’t a success, because we were trying something brave and innovative, and that was what Lionhead prided itself on doing,” says a source. “I think we felt that there were options; one thing we could have done pretty damn quickly is taken all the assets and made a Fable 4 out of it pretty easily. We felt like we had a life-raft. But that didn’t happen.”

Wezoin

Zython wrote: »

In regards to MS's "poor year", I think it might have more to do with Halo 5 not moving as many XB1s as they expected. That's just my theory, though.

In fairness, Halo minus any form of split screen play is no Halo I want to play. I bought Halo 5 without even checking for whether it had split screen because it just seemed like a no-brainer that it would. I absolutely will not be buying anything else from the series because I feel betrayed by it - Halo games are all about split screen.

WotanAnubis

Corporate mismanagement forces closure of smaller formerly independent development studio.

Think I've heard that one before.

I think the thing to take away here is that independent developers need to stay independent as best they can, because attaching yourself to a big publisher just isn't worth it.

cloudeagle

To be fair that level of mismanagement, at least post-Fable 3, seems pretty egregious.

tastydonuts

WotanAnubis wrote: »

Corporate mismanagement forces closure of smaller formerly independent development studio.

Think I've heard that one before.

I think the thing to take away here is that independent developers need to stay independent as best they can, because attaching yourself to a big publisher just isn't worth it.

Or an independent developer needs to avoid the following situation:

Before Fable Legends, Lionhead was in a strange place. After Fable 2, the studio’s most successful game, Lionhead was divided. Its owners, Microsoft, were keen for it to keep working on yet more Fable. But its famously esoteric founder, Peter Molyneux, had grown bored of the franchise, and between 2008 and his departure from Lionhead in early 2012 he was spending much of his time on esoteric passion projects. One such project was Milo and Kate, intended as a showcase for Microsoft’s then-new Kinect technology, an odd piece of software that intended to create the illusion that you were communicating with a young boy who lived inside your Xbox. (It was cancelled in 2010, and much of its tech was put to use on Fable: The Journey, also intended to be an illustration of Kinect’s wondrous powers).

After Milo and Kate, Molyneux and a large team of others at Lionhead were working on something called Project Opal – a sprawling project so unfocused that even the other designers working on it had no idea what it was actually supposed to be in the end, according to some people who were with the studio at the time. (Due to non-disclosure and redundancy agreements, the people who spoke to me for this article did not wish to be identified.) Opal was to be a vast, interconnected game across PC, mobile and console, some kind of cross between a village-building, resource-gathering game, action game and management sim. Molyneux retroactively describes it as “a game that never existed before”, intended to “connect millions of people together". Thematically, it bears some resemblance to what Molyneux went on to attempt with Curiosity and Godus.

For some people at Lionhead, this troubled period was when the studio’s problems started. The studio was burning through time, money and goodwill with its owners at Microsoft, whilst failing to come up with anything that could actually be released. A group of Lionhead’s key staff left in 2012, unsure of the studio’s direction or its future. Molyneux himself left in March of that year.

Milo and Kate wasted money and it seems tech behind it was salvaged into Fable: The Journey... which... did not make much money.

Also, further summed up as this (the previous paragraph wasn't quoted in the earlier post):

Let’s take a look at Lionhead’s position in around 2012. The studio had about a hundred employees: not huge, but not small enough to be cheap either. It was Microsoft’s fourth-biggest studio. It was headquartered in Guildford, and though the UK is not the least expensive place in the world, it’s certainly less expensive than a studio in, say, California. Since its last successful release in 2010, it had spent a lot of its years burning money on incubation projects that never came to fruition. Lionhead was far enough away from Redmond to be insulated from it, but also far enough away to feel remote. Its position was by no means enormously secure.

If Lionhead did not follow Harrison’s new direction, what was it going to do? Fable Legends was the game that they had to make. And though not everyone at Lionhead was on board, they were going to make the best of it.

Bad Idea or not, Lionhead put itself in a situation of low-confidence where such an edict would be deemed necessary from above.

And having a game the response and state to which was this:

Fable Legends went into closed beta on the 16th October, 2014, and it would stay in closed beta until the servers were shut down on April 13, 2016. One Lionhead employee I talked to maintained that it could have been released pretty much at any time. The studio, on the other hand, wanted it to launch in its best possible state.

“I was of the opinion that we could have released Legends at any point. It was good to go. But we intentionally didn’t release it, because the last thing we wanted to do was release it when there were problems with the game that meant many people wouldn’t come back,” they say. “You wanted to release it when the game was right. But I guess we ran out of time.”

Testimony varies on the state of Fable Legends during its protracted beta. Some say the game was pretty much in place; others maintain that there were still big problems with balance, and that it was still lacking significant, crucial features.

“It was really clear during the latter half of the closed beta that player retention was a challenge,” says a source. “We knew it was going to be a challenge, because the early closed beta versions you just got to play the one quest, which was a good fun experience – but it needed a metagame on top of it to get people to come back for another go. A lot of those systems came in quite late; monetisation wasn’t turned on until October last year. Our monetisation stats were pretty good, and we had some incredibly passionate players who racked up over 1,000 hours playing, but it would appear that during the closed beta, there was a much larger number of people who would load it up once and wouldn’t come back.”
"We knew that we were supposed to be part of the greatest ever holiday line-up on Xbox One. We hadn’t made that, and we were on borrowed time."

“Much like any free-to-play game, you don’t project that a very high percentage of people are going to pay for it. We beat some of our projections; people who did play the game did spend money and spent more than we expected, but the size of the instal base was a large part of our pain,” says another.

“That’s what we were trying to fix in the first few months of this year. We were making progress, but we knew that we were supposed to be part of the greatest ever holiday line-up on Xbox One. We hadn’t made that, and we were on borrowed time. If we didn’t get to a point soon to release, we’d be in trouble.”

Report of Source H/T Unco

Darkewolfe

WotanAnubis wrote: »

Corporate mismanagement forces closure of smaller formerly independent development studio.

Think I've heard that one before.

I think the thing to take away here is that independent developers need to stay independent as best they can, because attaching yourself to a big publisher just isn't worth it.

Stop me if you've heard this one: independent studio gets acquired and suddenly has nearly unlimited credit. Wastes oodles and oodles of money accomplishing nothing, then gets shut down when the parent company says, "Fine, if you can't come up with a way to make money you'll work on MY projects" and they're no good at it.

Archsorcerer

Yeah, they needed to stick to their indie roots. Keep it patron-artist if you don't want to get sucked into corporate oblivion.

Orogogus

Archsorcerer wrote: »

Yeah, they needed to stick to their indie roots. Keep it patron-artist if you don't want to get sucked into corporate oblivion.

Usually the people calling the shots, who decide whether or not to sell, aren't the ones who are ground down and screwed when the dust settles.

Archsorcerer

Yeah, the bosses' fault.

Orogogus

Ya. I'm just saying, it doesn't do any good to say they had to do such-and-such to avoid whatever. Those guys who got the short end of the stick probably didn't have any say in the matter, and the ones who did probably have millions of small consolations. If anyone didn't want to get sucked into corporate oblivion, they should have gotten rich and started their own damn company. Capitalism, ho!

The Wolfman

Reading that, it seemed like half "Microsoft flailing about amid console/PC woes" and half "Lionhead in over their heads with a project".

cloudeagle

Late and off-topic, but:

“I reckon [Phil Spencer] feels bad about Lionhead, but I think for him, he has to run all of Microsoft Studios as a business,” they say. “First-party studios isn’t doing so well. Halo 5 is a big miss, versus projections. Minecraft is a big miss, versus projections. Compared to either one of those, Lionhead is practically a rounding error. But I think if your division is under-performing, you have to go to your boss with something on the altar.”

How the fuck is Minecraft considered to be a big miss? It sells in the top 10 every month! Microsoft's projections must be bugnuts crazy.

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The Wolfman

cloudeagle wrote: »

Late and off-topic, but:

“I reckon [Phil Spencer] feels bad about Lionhead, but I think for him, he has to run all of Microsoft Studios as a business,” they say. “First-party studios isn’t doing so well. Halo 5 is a big miss, versus projections. Minecraft is a big miss, versus projections. Compared to either one of those, Lionhead is practically a rounding error. But I think if your division is under-performing, you have to go to your boss with something on the altar.”

How the fuck is Minecraft considered to be a big miss? It sells in the top 10 every month! Microsoft's projections must be bugnuts crazy.

I imagine it sells fantastically. But when you spend 2 Billion (with a B!) on it, your profit projections are really skewed.

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tastydonuts

Aegeri wrote: »

Reading multiple articles now, I now conclusively feel that this isn't Microsoft's mess inherently. Lionhead seems to have been run atrociously right from the start, held together only by a force of personality and frankly, without MS would Fable have even existed? It sounds to me like the only way they ever made Fable or its sequels were because of MS. Molyneux becoming bored of the franchise and effectively burning money on wasteful tech demos that went nowhere, like Milo and Kate, also seems to have not helped. Microsoft's awful business decisions with Fable Legends and "Games as a service" falling over didn't help, but honestly they were doomed for a long time.

Just quoting you saying this... for the archives. :P

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cloudeagle

Aegeri wrote: »

I really worry about any company that Molyneux has any major say in. The description of their other project, Opal, which seemed to throw away money doing nothing at all was probably the real death knell. I'm personally curious what Opal could have been, but Lionhead I think weren't the company to make that game.

On the one hand, any even vaguely innovative company spends time making things are known experiments that may or may not turn into a finished product.

On the other, there's story after story of all the major, avoidable fuckups being done by 22Cans.

Unco-ordinated

One of the takeaways for me is that there's a very good chance Rare could be next on the chopping block if Sea of Thieves isn't a hit or even takes too long to come out.

LD50

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

One of the takeaways for me is that there's a very good chance Rare could be next on the chopping block if Sea of Thieves isn't a hit or even takes too long to come out.

Rare is pretty dead already. Sea of Thieves is supposed to release this year but we have yet to see an actual release date or any game footage that actually shows us what it is. On top of that it's an MMO which is not a promising genre to be releasing games into. Beyond that, the only games they've developed in the last ten years are Killer instinct, Viva Pinata spinnoffs, and some kinect games.

tastydonuts

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

One of the takeaways for me is that there's a very good chance Rare could be next on the chopping block if Sea of Thieves isn't a hit or even takes too long to come out.

Sea of Thieves has been progressing to the point where they had a contest in March to play it first, the winners selected in May? I haven't been able to track down impressions from those people but I imagine they are NDA'd or haven't gone there yet...

Either way, how that translates into the sales at large? Who knows. Perhaps there will be more gameplay this E3? But Rare isn't really in the same situation as Lionhead.

Archsorcerer

Rare didn't develop Killer Instinct. It started with a studio that got acquired by Amazon and now Dave Lang and his team are in charge of it.

Unco-ordinated

LD50 wrote: »

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

One of the takeaways for me is that there's a very good chance Rare could be next on the chopping block if Sea of Thieves isn't a hit or even takes too long to come out.

Rare is pretty dead already. Sea of Thieves is supposed to release this year but we have yet to see an actual release date or any game footage that actually shows us what it is. On top of that it's an MMO which is not a promising genre to be releasing games into. Beyond that, the only games they've developed in the last ten years are Killer instinct, Viva Pinata spinnoffs, and some kinect games.

As far as I'm aware, Sea of Thieves isn't a MMO, it's a group MP game in the same vein as Destiny and The Division. But yeah, I think you might be right, Rare are probably in an even worse position than Lionhead were. At least Lionhead had Fable 2 and 3 to fall back on, Rare has Kinect Sports and Avatars...

Oh and yeah, as Archsorcerer said, Killer Instinct was all Double Helix and Season 2 onwards is Iron Galaxy.

tastydonuts wrote: »

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

One of the takeaways for me is that there's a very good chance Rare could be next on the chopping block if Sea of Thieves isn't a hit or even takes too long to come out.

Sea of Thieves has been progressing to the point where they had a contest in March to play it first, the winners selected in May? I haven't been able to track down impressions from those people but I imagine they are NDA'd or haven't gone there yet...

Either way, how that translates into the sales at large? Who knows. Perhaps there will be more gameplay this E3? But Rare isn't really in the same situation as Lionhead.

Fable Legends was playable for like a year and a half when they cancelled it, so I don't really think that's a sign of much.

But as for the bold bit, why aren't they? You seem fine with considering Lionhead a mess because they spent a lot of time and money prototyping ideas that never went anywhere but Rare were even worse in that regard. There's an enormous list of all the failed ideas/concepts they've come up with over the years and those are just the ones that leaked or they were willing to talk about.

tastydonuts

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

One of the takeaways for me is that there's a very good chance Rare could be next on the chopping block if Sea of Thieves isn't a hit or even takes too long to come out.

Rare is pretty dead already. Sea of Thieves is supposed to release this year but we have yet to see an actual release date or any game footage that actually shows us what it is. On top of that it's an MMO which is not a promising genre to be releasing games into. Beyond that, the only games they've developed in the last ten years are Killer instinct, Viva Pinata spinnoffs, and some kinect games.

As far as I'm aware, Sea of Thieves isn't a MMO, it's a group MP game in the same vein as Destiny and The Division. But yeah, I think you might be right, Rare are probably in an even worse position than Lionhead were. At least Lionhead had Fable 2 and 3 to fall back on, Rare has Kinect Sports and Avatars...

Oh and yeah, as Archsorcerer said, Killer Instinct was all Double Helix and Season 2 onwards is Iron Galaxy.

tastydonuts wrote: »

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

One of the takeaways for me is that there's a very good chance Rare could be next on the chopping block if Sea of Thieves isn't a hit or even takes too long to come out.

Sea of Thieves has been progressing to the point where they had a contest in March to play it first, the winners selected in May? I haven't been able to track down impressions from those people but I imagine they are NDA'd or haven't gone there yet...

Either way, how that translates into the sales at large? Who knows. Perhaps there will be more gameplay this E3? But Rare isn't really in the same situation as Lionhead.

Fable Legends was playable for like a year and a half when they cancelled it, so I don't really think that's a sign of much.

But as for the bold bit, why aren't they? You seem fine with considering Lionhead a mess because they spent a lot of time and money prototyping ideas that never went anywhere but Rare were even worse in that regard. There's an enormous list of all the failed ideas/concepts they've come up with over the years and those are just the ones that leaked or they were willing to talk about.

Rare Replay did pretty well. Is it a compilation of their earlier works? Sure, but it sold and has a fairly positive reception both in the review and blogosphere.

Fable Legends on the other hand had weak beta turnout, and mixed responses.

LD50

tastydonuts wrote: »

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

One of the takeaways for me is that there's a very good chance Rare could be next on the chopping block if Sea of Thieves isn't a hit or even takes too long to come out.

Rare is pretty dead already. Sea of Thieves is supposed to release this year but we have yet to see an actual release date or any game footage that actually shows us what it is. On top of that it's an MMO which is not a promising genre to be releasing games into. Beyond that, the only games they've developed in the last ten years are Killer instinct, Viva Pinata spinnoffs, and some kinect games.

As far as I'm aware, Sea of Thieves isn't a MMO, it's a group MP game in the same vein as Destiny and The Division. But yeah, I think you might be right, Rare are probably in an even worse position than Lionhead were. At least Lionhead had Fable 2 and 3 to fall back on, Rare has Kinect Sports and Avatars...

Oh and yeah, as Archsorcerer said, Killer Instinct was all Double Helix and Season 2 onwards is Iron Galaxy.

tastydonuts wrote: »

Unco-ordinated wrote: »

One of the takeaways for me is that there's a very good chance Rare could be next on the chopping block if Sea of Thieves isn't a hit or even takes too long to come out.

Sea of Thieves has been progressing to the point where they had a contest in March to play it first, the winners selected in May? I haven't been able to track down impressions from those people but I imagine they are NDA'd or haven't gone there yet...

Either way, how that translates into the sales at large? Who knows. Perhaps there will be more gameplay this E3? But Rare isn't really in the same situation as Lionhead.

Fable Legends was playable for like a year and a half when they cancelled it, so I don't really think that's a sign of much.

But as for the bold bit, why aren't they? You seem fine with considering Lionhead a mess because they spent a lot of time and money prototyping ideas that never went anywhere but Rare were even worse in that regard. There's an enormous list of all the failed ideas/concepts they've come up with over the years and those are just the ones that leaked or they were willing to talk about.

Rare Replay did pretty well. Is it a compilation of their earlier works? Sure, but it sold and has a fairly positive reception both in the review and blogosphere.

Fable Legends on the other hand had weak beta turnout, and mixed responses.

In a similar vein, Lionhead had the two Fable re-releases. I don't know how well they did exactly, but they're both positively reviewed on steam.

cloudeagle

Did Rare Replay sell? I get the impression it didn't, since it went on sale pretty much instantly.

To be fair, Rare's been under pretty much direct control of Microsoft ever since Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts (remade twice and sold like ass -- shame, since it's a good game). First they became the house of avatars n' Kinect, and now they're fully invested in the "games as a service" madness.

It's really weird how few internal studios Microsoft even has anymore. If you take this list and filter out the casualware, the only ones they have left is 343, Turn 10, Mojang, The Coalition and Rare. I'm starting to think Microsoft's problem is putting too many eggs in too few baskets -- if Fable Legends soaked up money, I wonder just how big of a money pit Sea of Thieves has been.

Then again Microsoft's been doing a much better job of bankrolling third parties to make exclusives, judging by all the stuff we got last E3. All original properties too, which is something rare these days.