Microsoft acknowledges missteps about the acquisition and closure of Fable studio Lionhead – Gaming – News

Microsoft made mistakes in acquiring Lionhead. Several Microsoft executives acknowledge this in the documentary Power On: The Story of Xbox. Lionhead closed in 2016 after the free game Fable Legends was cancelled.

“One of the biggest mistakes we’ve learned in the past is Lionhead Studios,” Shannon Loftis said. she was General Director of World Games Publishing In the Xbox division when Microsoft closed Lionhead in 2016. This studio had been acquired by Microsoft ten years earlier.

“We actually released Fable 1 and it was a huge hit,” Loftis explains. “People wanted more, so we bought Lionhead. Those were good years.” Then Fable 2 came out and that was also a success, but then Microsoft worked on their Xbox One and the idea was that the Kinect for gesture control would play an important role in this generation. That’s why Microsoft allowed Lionhead Myth: The Journey make on rails Players must cast magic spells through the Kinect controller using hand gestures. That game was somewhat similar 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 very different from the pillars that made Fable 1 and 2 so popular.”

After Fable: The Journey from 2012, in 2013 Develop fable legends announced. This multiplayer game set in the Fable universe was supposed to be a free-to-play title on Xbox and Windows 10, but a few years later, Microsoft announced to halt development And not much later Lionhead Studios . is closed.

“You’re taking 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.

These statements are made In the sixth episode of Power On: The Story of Xbox. This is a Microsoft documentary series on the origin of Xbox. The series can be watched on YouTube on Monday.

Lionhead was founded in 1997 by, among others, Peter Molyneux. The studio was best known for Black & White and Fable. After the studio closed, the rights to Fable remained with Microsoft. Forza developer now working on Playground games New fairy tale game. It uses the ForzaTech engine that was developed for the Forza and Forza Horizon racing games.

The video begins with a fragment about Lionhead Studios