Microsoft admits missteps around acquisition and closure of Fable studio Lionhead
Microsoft made mistakes with the acquisition of Lionhead. Several Microsoft executives acknowledge this in the documentary Power On: The Story of Xbox. Lionhead closed in 2016 after free-to-play game Fable Legends was scrapped.
“One of the biggest missteps we’ve learned in the past is Lionhead Studios,” said Shannon Loftis. She was general manager of global games publishing for the Xbox division when Lionhead was closed by Microsoft in 2016. Microsoft had acquired that studio ten years earlier.
“We had already released Fable 1 and it was a hit. People wanted more, so we bought Lionhead. Those were good years,” Loftis explains. Then Fable 2 appeared and that was also a success, but then Microsoft worked on its Xbox One and the idea was that the Kinect for gesture control would play an important role in that generation. Microsoft therefore had Lionhead make Fable: The Journey, an on-rails in which players have to cast magical spells via the Kinect controller with hand gestures. That game bore little resemblance to previous Fable titles and was not well received.
“The Fable-Kinect wedding didn’t really work out,” Loftis said. “Fable: The Journey was a passion project for a lot of people, but I think it was quite different from the pillars that made Fable 1 and 2 so popular.”
Following 2012’s Fable: The Journey, development of Fable Legends was announced in 2013. That multiplayer game in the Fable universe was supposed to be a free-to-play title for Xbox and Windows 10, but a few years later Microsoft announced that it was discontinuing development and Lionhead Studios was closed shortly after.
“You take over a studio for what they’re good at at the time and your job is to help them get there, not let them help you with what you’re doing,” said Xbox CEO Phil Spencer. In doing so, he indirectly indicates that the Kinect game was a wrong choice.
The statements are made in the sixth episode Power On: The Story of Xbox. This is a documentary series from Microsoft about the origin of the Xbox. The series can be viewed on YouTube from Monday.
Lionhead was founded in 1997 by, among others, Peter Molyneux. The studio became famous with Black & White and Fable. After the studio closed, the rights for Fable remained with Microsoft. Meanwhile, Forza developer Playground Games is working on a new Fable game. It uses the ForzaTech engine developed for the Forza and Forza Horizon racing games.
Video starts with fragment about Lionhead Studios