Breaking: Fable Legends cancelled, Lionhead and Press Play studio closed

Sony is looking to hire those affected by the fable team closure

Sorry to hear the sad news about #LionheadStudios today - we're here to help any affected people -

https://twitter.com/PlayStationJobs

It looks like they closed a total of 8 studios today.

• Lionhead
• Press Play
• Big Park
• Good Science
• FUNction
• SOTA
• Team Dakota
• Leap Experience Pioneers

Good guy Phil. Such an improvement over that evil Don Mattrick amiritie?

@finalstar2007: Good guy Sony, looking out for the gamers and devs during difficult times. :P They are practicing the live, love, and learn philosophy preached by our dear leader Kaz Hirai.

Sony has never closed studios down?

@misterpmedia said:

@cainetao11 said:

@finalstar2007: WTF? Do you work there? How do you know the employees had no notice? WE had no notice. We don't work there.

Fair enough. But doors arent shut for 30 days. There's the notice.

Not sure Sony could hire 8 studios worth of people...

Early spring cleaning from Microsoft :).

I agree. I've been playing it for several months and the game is great. Why pull the plug on a game that's almost done. Just a dumb move by Microsoft me thinks. I hope they have something to replace these games and developers.

8 in a single day and cancel a game that was near completion?

@finalstar2007: Media Molecule is located close to Lionhead. Might be time to expand....with only the top talent though.

@mems_1224: Sony Too.

I see you have given up all pretenses of not being a Microsoft apologist.

Well said. We all have our personal favorites from the AAA space but in the end, much like film, this is a business first. Many friends were film students and they all are so tired of the super hero films. But those and horror are the industry's largest grossing genre's. Gaming has followed down the narrow pipe line of product because many of us will not, and I am calling myself out primarily (always keep it in the I), shell out money for something different. Money doesnt come easy and I want what I have a comfortable idea I will enjoy for my $60. I am by no means frugal, but gaming is by no means a priority in my life either. So we can sit here and get mad that the masses buy COD, Halo, Madden, AC, GoW but in the end it's their right to do so. No right or wrong to it.

Where's the source on them closing 8 studios

@demacabre said:

@misterpmedia said:

@cainetao11 said:

@finalstar2007: WTF? Do you work there? How do you know the employees had no notice? WE had no notice. We don't work there.

Wtf.... so... they had no idea it was even coming? That's cold.

No matter when someone tells you something for the first time, there is no warning. People are acting like this is cold. How were they supposed to tell them? By starting a month of rumors on social media that they may pull the plug? Yeah, that sounds like a nice way to be strung along. When I have been laid off of jobs I was called in and told the bad news. Nobody warned me that my position at the company was being dissolved. Thats life in the adult world.

Good riddance the game was trash. Sorry for those who lost their jobs. I was not surprised when lion head kept blasting my inbox to get me to come back on the beta. They were even offering tons of in game money just for signing on (which I still didn't do)

Rip fable 1 it was the only good game this studio produced.

The Minecraft devs will be next 10 years down the road when they continually fail to make something that is even remotely close to minecraft in terms of success.

Sadly after hearing about the Scalebound year delay, I feared this very same fate would be the outcome for that game.

After seeing MS's long time Lionhead developer not only cancel Fable Legends but talks of closing the studio OUT OF THE BLUE it all but confirms that we might not ever see the wondrous human dragon JRPG come to light.

With this news and after the Scalebound Delay it raises the chances of an eventual announcement of cancellation from around 50/50 to about 85% -95% for Scalebound.

If i was MS, I think I would be looking at coming up with a new console and focus on that for a while.

Well, that came out of nowhere. Best of luck to all the developers. I hate to see folks lose their jobs.

Brutal, I just downloaded the last update today, will def keep playing until the door is shut. Hopefully they can somehow save it, it's a rather enjoyable game and had more fun with this over the other free to play games on xbox one.

Fable Legends was probably in development hell by a developer that has been struggling for years. Platinum is still finding work despite a lot of their games not selling a ton. Both situations are not comparable. There is a good chance scalebound eventually releases for the xbox one.

You don't see the writing on the wall? MS has all but made an official announcement they are done with consoles.

Of course they can't actually come out and say that because they would loose even more money but they aren't investing anything into the xbox console platform anymore.

if you are an xbox fan, it's best you buy you a high end PC with windows 10 and support them that way, the people who invested in their console have pretty much been abandon in what is less the 3 years on the market. Gears 4 just may be the last high profile game xbox one gets this gen.

I expect Scalebound to be canceled based on all the moves MS has been making lately.

https://twitter.com/VG_Dave/status/706957781417533440

Damn that sucks

https://twitter.com/VG_Dave/status/706957781417533440

It's not official but 8 studios have been removed from microsoftstudios.com, 2 of them (Lionhead and Press Play) were the ones confirmed to be closing down. Team Dakota was basically confirmed as well since we already know everyone at the studio was laid off or moved somewhere else. The majority were small Hololens studios though.

Not sure if this has anything to do with all these Hololens studios reportedly closing down, but the guy in charge of Hololens games development at Microsoft was killed in a car crash recently.

But this isn't about Platinum, it's about MS...it's about MS.

I mean we can hope, but even tho I never spoke because people would have bashed me thinking I was hating, when Scalebound was first delayed the first thought that came to my head was that they might just pushing the date back because MS isn't sure they want to continue funding the game but aren't ready to commit to saying they are killing another project and hurt sales further.

To give you another idea of why I was thinking this, the SAME thing happened with MS and the silent treatment on making an official announcement to fans about the cancellation of Phantom Dust!

A delay and then silence...I mean it just seems a bit shady

Wow.

HaloGearsForzaFable

After Gears Judgment (bastardizing of the franchise):

HaloGearsForzaFable

AFter 343 took over Halo:

HaloGearsForzaFable

After Lionhead closes:

HaloGearsForzaFable

So what, an annual racer is all that is left? LMAO, gg lems.

And we'll never get that true Fable 2 sequel. :'(

I guess not wanting to continue to lose billions as Sony did/does in other areas of their company? It's the only logical reason.

this being your first thought surprises no one. Lionhead haven't developed a hit in a long time and fable legend's beta was extended because beta testers didn't find the game very enjoyable. I was in the beta and trust me..this game wasn't gonna have a huge following. What many dont understand is that if you DO NOT produce a profitable game over a course of 5-10 years your owners are gonna give you the boot. This industry isn't a charity.

The same thing happened to zipper interactive(developers of socom) ..the sales of the series tanked and sony closed them down.

Didn't you forget that Forza has become an annual cash in game that has lost most of it's value and that not even xbox fans care to buy? on it's launch month I can't even secure the lowest spot on NDP.

MS has to re-market it to PC gamers calling it "APEX" in hopes that someone will buy it.

A game barely being talked about and shown and then being delayed does not mean that it will be canceled. There have been multiple games this gen like Zelda WiiU that have been barely talked about and shown and they were either eventually released or are eventually going to release. We do need more evidence to determine if scalebound will be canceled.

I really really enjoyed the very start to the Fable Legends beta, all the way up to the city was gold, if they had made a solid single player experience based off that early gameplay, the game would be a massive hit. It had the graphics, the attention to detail, the comedy in the narrator, then they ruined it all with battle arenas.

So sad to see a studios efforts go to waste though, I hope they are looked after and either get great severance pay or get re-allocated.

Lems should leave SW. They will never be taken seriously in a gaming discussion again.

Oh dear. Times, they are a changin'.

@mems_1224: nowhere near the rate MS has not even close.

You take things kind of personal, but my thought process is totally logical and I even explained it. Saying my though surprises no one is you ignoring the factual tendency and patterns MS have proven to follow with various projects like this.

And the bold---right there, unknowingly, you further support my argument. Do you honestly think MS believes Scalebound will have a "huge following" with their bro user base? No, they were still trying to compete with Sony and expand their verity of titles to capture the mind of gamers outside for the core xbox demographic when they announced Scalebound. I mean MS was still hyping Quantum Break, ReCore, and Forza as exclusives for xbox one then.

Not too soon after things took a completely different turn for what MS was trying to do and are cutting loose anything that isn't going to lead to a hefty return on investment. Quantum Break was already far along in development, but Scalebound...being delayed a year?

You need a reality check and stop taking things personal because your fanboy bias against anyone who doesn't worship MS and is blind to the trends they have followed in the past ala Phantom Dust.

MS has always been like that with every product they ever created. Xbox has never been about profits for them. The company as a whole profits tremendously. It's always been about becoming a home brand front and central in the living room. They are far from being done with consoles and selling games on the Windows store front exclusively is them attempting to keep the PC away from the living room unlike what Valve has plans for. They prefer both to be separate experiences.

Actually me saying your thought process surprises nobody is me saying just that. All you're doing is putting words in my mouth. microsoft is in the process of a shift in direction and it may or may not have anything to do with scalebound's delay.

Not really sure how my post shows im taking this personal. I knew fable legends was gonna be a failure and this news doesn't shock me.

I think Scalebound is safe from being cancelled for the most part since Platinum has a great track record and they are efficient when it comes to budget and development times. It's very likely it'll bomb in sales, but that's typical of their games.

I'd say ReCore and Sea of Thieves have a greater chance of being cancelled. ReCore has no gameplay, was supposed to release in the spring, what looks like a short development time for a small team, Armature has only done ports and a mediocre Batman game, and there's also Keiji Inafune to inspire more confidence.

Sea of Thieves with its whole always online, crossplay, being an ambitious title while the current Rare has pretty much been shit. Crackdown doesn't inspire much confidence either with the weird way they're releasing the game, online portion only in 2016, and it being run on clouds.

Maybe after trimming the fat they can spend that money financing a worthwhile studio. Showing more studios cut in action is actually more illuminating what happened taking a step back and looking at everything.

Looking at these studios they haven't been doing more than wasting time and money. Maybe Lionhead / Fable Legends being cut is the hardest pill to swallow, but probably expected to be underwhelming as a free-to-play game, they've put out a disappointing Fable III, Fable Heroes XBLA avatar game, the Fable Journey Kinect rail game, they were a team going nowhere.

Good Sciences, they had Kinect Adventures, Kinect Fun Labs, and Kinect Star Wars under their belt and nothing else (not even a mentioned work in progress).

Press Play just the Max and Tentacle games, and games like Kalimba and the unreleased Knoxville looking bad even by indie junk standards.

Big Park, they did Kinect Joy Ride, Kinect Sports Season 2, Joy Ride Turbo, and nothing else since.

Leap Experiene Pioneers was a former Kinect team that reassigned to be a new studio, was announced back when new teams like SOTA and [FUN]ction (who've developed nothing and to my knowledge have nothing under development. When it was announced they were hiring and starting up new studios just a couple years ago, Good Sciences took to recruiting new employees with the others mentioned have produced nothing, and shown work on nothing. There were a couple other teams that started up about then who I've also heard nothing about, wouldn't be surprised if they were next, those were N (or sometimes referred to by NP, and Platform Next.

Of all these teams, only two to produce anything in recent years Team Dakota and that was quite shit (Project Spark), Press Play released a few junkie indie games of no consequence, and Lionhead had a work in progress that was likely going nowhere.

@lawlessx:

For blind fanboys who take things personal start crying before even thinking if what they were crying about makes sense. I.E. YOU

DEVELOPER SHUTS DOWN, 50 PEOPLE LOSE THEIR JOBS

Microsoft announced a reboot of a 10-year-old Xbox cult-classic, Phantom Dust, at its E3 conference last year. This raised a lot of "huh?" and a lot of "uh, ok" (from me included) but people who played the original were excited as hell.

Well, the independent studio making the reboot in partnership with Microsoft, Darkside Games, had to be shut down last month after Microsoft cancelled Darkside's version ofPhantom Dust, costing 50 people their jobs.

Microsoft is still working on a Phantom Dust reboot, though. Weird. It's still unclear if Microsoft is continuing from where Darkside left off, which would be shady,or starting the reboot from scratch.

What Darkside came up with, this"near-final" footageleaked to Kotaku, looks alright, to the studio's credit. Not as good as that recently leaked footage of the canceled Soul Reaver sequel, but not cancellation-bad.

http://www.destructoid.com/microsoft-canceled-xbox-one-phantom-dust-reboot-leaked-looks-alright-289304.phtml

Weird, wasn't Fable Legends "near final footage" too? Then...

XBOX ONE'S PHANTOM DUST NO LONGER IN ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT

MICROSOFT-CANCELED PROJECT DONE

Microsoft announced a Phantom Dust reboot at its E3 conference in 2014, but less than a year later the project was shelved, allegedly due to unfair demands by Microsoft.

.... At that time, Microsoft maintained it was still working on the game, and it was unclear if another developer was going to clean up Darkside's work or if it would turn into a new project entirely.

However, in an interview with Gamer Tag Radio, Xbox marketing lead Aaron Greenberg said "we don't have an active developer on it right now."

"It's been a passion project for [Xbox boss] Phil [Spencer] and a lot of the folks on the team," Greenburg said. "And we're currently exploring what we're gonna do longer term with Phantom Dust. The project is not cancelled but we don't have an active developer on it right now. It's a project that, like many things, will take a little more time. But at this point we're not giving any more updates on it."

http://www.destructoid.com/xbox-one-s-phantom-dust-no-longer-in-active-development-294631.phtml

So, even when ending development and killing the developers they tell you to hold tight because the game is not dead and to hold on the idea that the game exists so fans buy xbox one!

"Bu but this is all new"....Like I said MS trends.

@kratosyoloswag: I hope you're right about Scalebound, at least. They cancel that and I'm selling my Xbone immediately.

@lamprey263: Instead of building new studios they'll probably focus on hiring developers like they've been doing for the majority of their games this gen.
Ryse, Dead Rising, Killer Instinct, Sunset Overdrive, Forza Horizon, Phantom Dust, Scalebound, Quantum Break, Crackdown, ReCore.

It's probably cheaper and safer to do it this way than create new studios.

The future of the xboxone depends on what happens at this year's E3 imo.

I honestly don't know what to take from this.

It's bad some will loose their jobs.

And Fable Legend was in that DirectX12 video.

I am baffled by this.

EXACTLY! That's why they won't tell you.

Look at my last post, Look at this recent out blue recent announcement that Quantum Break was coming to PC day 1, Look at the cancellation of this project and even the developers didn't know they were getting shut down 5 hours before the hammer came down on them...

MS has a trend of letting people know their house is on fire only after it's burnt down.

Case in point, Its not like MS is going announce if they were going to ax Scalebound, at least not until the last possible minute. It's the same reason they REMOVED Gears 4 from the conformed PC releases list when they announced Quantum Break. Even though they are 100% doing Gears 4 PC version they aren't going to tell everyone now when some might buy an xbox one for that game in ignorance.

They may not be pushing xbox one, but they aren't going to give people any less reasons to pick one up at least until the last possible minute.

To me at this point it looks like Microsoft want to be more of a publisher like Activision or EA hence the reason why almost all their exclusives are moving towards PC (most likely halo is next since its the only one left), wouldnt be surprised if very soon they'll even announce gears or halo for playstation or nintendo

they want money and becoming a publisher is a money generating machine (just look at activision and EA)

Jesus Christ. MS should just stick to Windows and Microsoft office. That's it. Just keep pumping out their bread and butter. Their console is terrible. The Xbox brand as a whole is worthless. Their phones are shit.

Anyone who chooses Xbox at this point only does so cause they are blind fanboys. The console is a joke that keeps bleeding.

Microsoft happened...nuff said