Back in the early 2000s, Lionhead Studios was one of the top developers in gaming. The massive success of the original Fable directly led to the studio being acquired by Microsoft and things were looking bright for the British company. However, 10 years after Microsoft acquired the developer, Lionhead was shut down in 2016.
Now, for the first time, there’s an insight into what went wrong with the studio. As part of a new documentary series on the first 20 years of Xbox, Lionhead gets a short segment. In episode 6 of Power On: The Story of Xbox the documentary looks at Microsoft’s acquisition of studios. As part of that, Lionhead is used as an example of where the company made mistakes.
Shannon Loftis was the General Manager of Global Games Publishing at Microsoft when Lionhead was shut down. She said, “One of the biggest missteps that we learned from in the past was Lionhead”. She went on to describe how Fable began to falter as Microsoft tried to pair the game with Kinect.
Microsoft forcing Lionhead to work on Kinect was ultimately the reason the studio failed under its new parent company. Phil Spencer, the current head of Xbox, described what the company learned from the failed acquisition. “You acquire a studio for what they’re great at now, and your job is to help them accelerate how they do what they do, not them accelerate what you do.”
Ultimately, under Microsoft, Lionhead was not allowed to do what the developer was great at. After the failure of the Kinect only Fable: The Journey in 2012, Lionhead never released another game and the studio was closed four years later. If, as the documentary suggests, Microsoft has learned from its mistakes with Lionhead, perhaps other acquisitions can flourish under their parent company.
Go to minute 26 of the video at the source to watch the full segment on Lionhead.
