This week brought some very bad news for fans of the Fable franchise. Microsoft announced that it is canceling Fable Legends, and is likely closing Lionhead Studios entirely. This came as a huge surprise, since Fable Legends was due to enter public beta testing in April. It’s very unusual to see a game canceled so close to release, especially one that has been in development for so long and has been played widely by the public via betas and events. What’s going on here? I think this closure is an indication of a huge mistake that Microsoft is making this generation.
It’s not just about canning the Fable studio, which turns out entertaining but ultimately middling action-RPG titles. Industry savvy gamers are all discussing an insightful NeoGAF post detailing Microsoft’s numerous other aborted projects, many of which involve experiments with unusual genres or new technology, like cloud computing. It has killed off high profile titles like Project Spark and Ascend: New Gods . As of today, Microsoft’s first-party development studios have dwindled to a mere few, which are working on guaranteed blockbusters like the Halo and Gears franchises.
Microsoft has only itself to blame for this state. It has pulled away from the fertile indie game development scene that helped the Xbox 360 marketplace thrive. It has mismanaged a number of creative ideas, misunderstood the needs and desires of gamers with technology like Kinect, and misused developers like Black Tusk and Rare – dictating that those companies churn out the titles that the corporation prefers rather than the ones they themselves might like to create. And now it seems that Microsoft doesn’t want to support projects that aren’t guaranteed to print money, even if those projects (like Fable Legends ) have already had a ton of development money sunk into them.
Is Microsoft circling the wagons and going lean because it’s in second place this generation? It’s strange, because it’s not like the Xbox One is a failure. It’s a very popular console that is selling quite well – just not as well as the PlayStation 4. Perhaps this new direction is less about the One being in second place and more about a new direction from Microsoft’s upper management, which has seen a lot of turmoil since the announcement of the Xbox One.
Either way, when you’re the second-place console company, it’s not the time to shrink your development studios and focus only on guaranteed blockbusters. It’s the time to make up for a smaller pool of third-party exclusives by funding your own, even if they might not make a lot of money. If Microsoft is serious about staying in the console-making business after this generation, it needs to prove to its fans that it’s about more than just Halo and Gears of War. It needs to foster a healthy, diverse environment full of interesting games to show fans that it’s worth sticking with the Xbox brand.
Canceling Fable Legends and disbanding Lionhead feels like a mistake, just one of many that make it seem like Microsoft isn’t interested in supporting games other than high-profile shooters. Microsoft’s shrinking first-party output wastes a big opportunity that Sony has given Microsoft with its own sparse first-party lineup over the last few years. Instead of turning out a stellar lineup of diverse games and luring people back to the Xbox brand, Microsoft has fumbled and allowed Sony to continue dominating the marketplace with its larger number of third-party titles. No console can survive on blockbuster shooters alone, and current trends leave me feeling a bit gloomy about Microsoft’s console future.