Something else happened in 2012: former Sony executive Phil Harrison joined Microsoft as corporate vice president in charge of its European game development efforts. Harrison has a long history in the games industry – he is a part of the story of a great many high-profile games of the last two decades – and he had a very clear vision for where games were going. Phil passionately believed in games-as-service: in other words, long-tail online games that evolved with their player bases, and were probably free-to-play. This belief would be what determined Lionhead’s direction (and, judging by Sea of Thieves, Rare’s too)
“I thought I was going to be working on a single-player game, a more advanced version of Fable 3,” says one source. “But when they went to get that game approved, the three senior designers who were pitching it were told that ‘you will not be given permission to make Fable 4, or something that is a shadow Fable 4’. Phil Harrison’s vision for all of his studios in Europe was now for service-based games. That’s what he thought was the future of games. He didn’t want to make anything that was a £50 box, fire and forget. He wanted long tails of revenue, even if there was a smaller up-front burst of revenue.”
“The game was pitched to Harrison as a medium-scale game, a AA game. It was supposed to be out significantly earlier; it would have been last summer,” says a source. “But the size of the game just kept growing, and the fidelity value of the game kept growing. And that was because we were the servant of two masters. We reported to Phil Harrison, the master of Europe, but we also had another person that he does not report to: Phil Spencer [head of the Xbox division]. And he wants a beautiful AAA quality experience that he can use to sell Xbox Ones. So now we’re making a free-to-play game that’s as expensive as an AAA game. Very dangerous.”
“The original pitch was for a really cheap game – it certainly wasn’t the $75m we ended up spending,” corroborates another source. “There were going to be three phases of release. But as time wore on, there were various voices that made it more complicated. For example, Spencer was very keen on having the Fable features: it was crucial that it could be played single player, for instance that was suddenly a big important thing. It was also supposed to be “the prettiest ever online game” – that was Harrison, he wanted it to be prettier than anything else out there.
Xbox One sales were falling far short of projections. Windows 10 installs, too, were nowhere near what Microsoft had planned.
“Let’s be honest – we make our projections based on a series of assumptions,” reflects a former employee who worked closely with Microsoft. “There are supposed to be 2x as many Xboxes out there as there are right now. There are supposed to be 2x as many Windows 10 installs as there currently are. So now, when we look at how much money Legends could make in the free-to-play universe, you have to halve it.
“First-party studios isn’t doing so well. Halo 5 is a big miss, versus projections. Minecraft is a big miss, versus projections. Compared to either one of those, Lionhead is practically a rounding error. But I think if your division is under-performing, you have to go to your boss with something on the altar.”
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/06/09/how-fable-legends-took-down-lionhead
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