Ex Lionhead Producer: Microsoft the “Destroyer” of 1st Party Studio

[Pemalite]

Chris Hu said:

Pemalite said:

You don't know that.
They were having financial troubles sure, but they could have also found investment elsewhere.

For all we know they might have made the next big AAA 50+ million selling franchise if they were allowed to deviate from Fable, it's not like their games weren't fun.

EA is pretty quick to disbanned studios if the game doesn't sell well enough 38 Studios is probably the prime example for that.  MS and EA isn't the only publisher that dropped Lionhead Studios though, Activision also dropped then since they made two The Movies titles for them which isn't that much of a surprise since Activison is also pretty quick to disband developers.

Pretty sure EA couldn't have disbanded lionhead as they never owned the studio, they had a relationship similar to Crytek, they would have just ceased being their publisher and offering them financial support, again that could have been found elsewhere... Which  just happened to be Microsoft's outright purchase so they could enter the console market with ample first party studios.

 

This is a big loss, just like any other notable developer making games that people enjoy, not all developers hit it big on their first release, it took Bungie a few franchises to bring us Halo.