Many may remember Peter Molyneux leaving Lionhead recently because things were 'getting to easy' he wants the drama and the drive of trying to keep himself and his company afloat. There is art to motivating people to work their best.
Microsoft doesn't just want to buy developers, says Lionhead boss, because "that's the death knell"
"I think it wants them to go on their journey."
Microsoft has sunk around one billion dollars into Xbox One games development, and a healthy chunk of that has gone towards acquiring development studios, such as Max and the Curse of Brotherhood developer Press Play, or founding studios, such as cloud gaming specialist Lift London. The manufacturer doesn't view an acquisition campaign as the safest way to consolidate its first-party line-up, however - according to Lionhead's creative director Gary Carr, it would rather developers approach it after completing "their journey".
"It was seven years ago when we got bought, and Microsoft hasn't bought many studios," Carr reflected. "It hasn't rushed in and grabbed any newbies, because it doesn't want to do that - it doesn't want to own lots of studios, because it knows that all too often, that's the death knell. If studios want to be bought that's fine."
That acquisition (or as the wags may prefer, "selling out") is the surest way to stunt your creative growth is one of our industry's more lingering myths. There's plenty of evidence in support of the idea, to be fair - heed the testimony of ex-EA man and Payday 2 developer David Goldfarb, for instance - but the activities of (e.g.) Dishonored developer Arkane Studios suggest that it's possible to dodge the bullet.
The Fable series could also be taken as proof of this. In the course of the franchise's nine year life, Lionhead has experimented with the notion of dynamic moral alignments, plots that hinge on the player becoming a monarch, Kinect-powered cart-driving, scrappy, arts-and-crafty dungeon crawling and, latterly, co-op questing in which one player appears as the evil fantasy villain.
Lionhead originally joined Microsoft because it didn't have the resources to fund the games it wanted to make, Carr continued. "I think Lionhead was at the point where it wanted to be acquired, so that it could move onto the next phase. We could see where it was going, and how expensive game development was becoming, and the reality was that we were trying to stay at the triple-A, high-end development edge, and that was because we'd evolved to that point.
"If you look at games like Black & White, that was as cutting edge as you could get at that time. If you want to stay at that level, it's very difficult to remain indie. But we were happy making simple games like Theme Park and Theme Hospital, quite cheap to develop games, ten years earlier. That to me is as important as something like a Black & White or a Fable.
"So I don't think that Microsoft wants to buy studios, because I think it wants them to go on their journey," he concluded. "And if they're ready to be acquired, or ready to take more robust funding from a big corporation, I think Microsoft lets developers come to them."
Elsewhere in the full interview, which you can read in issue 103 of OXM (on sale now), Carr argues that Microsoft's U-turns on Xbox One show that the company isn't "aloof and removed" from gamers. Any thoughts of your own to share? For more on Microsoft's next gen line-up, consider our complete Xbox One games list.
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Really not sure I see any point of Consol over PC's since Kinect, Wii and other alternative ways to play have been abandoned. Top 50 'most fun' game list coming soon! |
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Tell me a funny joke! |
