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[Torchkas]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-12-lionhead-the-inside-story
  MAD

The upshot was that Lionhead found itself in a financially precarious position. It had an astronomical burn rate - that is, it was ploughing through over $1m a month just to meet its gargantuan wage bill. The money was running out, and Peter had had enough of business matters. He wanted to get stuck into game development again.

Meanwhile, key Black & White developers left to form a new studio. Mark Healey (who in his spare time had worked on Rag Doll Kung-fu, the first non-Valve game to be sold on Steam), Alex Evans, David Smith and Kareem Ettouney founded Media Molecule and went on to create LittleBigPlanet for Sony.

Their departure felt like the end of an era, but to some it didn't come as a surprise. "They had a room out the back where they had them not working on any of the major games," Andy Robson says.

In 2002 Microsoft paid $375m for Rare. Sources familiar with the Lionhead deal say Microsoft snapped up the studio for "a song". One source says it went for under $20m. "It was tens of millions of pounds," is all Peter Molyneux will say.

"They sold it for peanuts. They sold it to save it. They were burning money.

"I missed my kids growing up because I was in that office the whole time, not because I was doing it for the money, but for the passion of making games. They forgot all that shit."

"The marketing was shit," he says. "It was terrible. They just didn't get it. But it wasn't Microsoft's marketing. Marketing was like its own department. And they were going, what are you making? An RPG? Right, dragons and shit. And that was their advert. And we were like, no, ours is a Monty Python-esque comedy. And they went, look, we know how to market RPGs. And they opened the RPG marketing drawer and pulled out a picture of a dragon that wasn't even in the game and went there you go. That's your market. The market for that game is your average Dungeons & Dragons fare. And we were like, this game's totally different.

"That annoyed me."

McCormack was further incensed over a row over the box art for Fable 2.

"They were going, you can't have a black person on the cover, and you can't have a woman. And you want a black woman. And I was like, yes, I do, because it's about be whatever hero you want. No. It's a white guy. That's just the way it is. We know what sells and that's fucking it. Stop the arguing. I was like, fuck you! That was a huge fight.

"They said, what's the most unsuccessful Disney film? I was like, I don't know. They went, Princess and the Frog. Work it out. I was like fuck you, man. I hated it.

"I was screaming at them in conference calls. I lost it at that point, because they just weren't getting the game. Especially because we were the first ever game that had gay marriage, we were about breaking down walls. It was meant to be funny and mature. They just took none of it and just did the usual white guy with a sword on the front. Damn it! You missed the point!"

At E3 2003, Peter Molyneux did a press interview about Fable. In it he announced multiplayer for the game. Developers back at Guildford watched in horror. No-one had heard anything about multiplayer. One engineer, we were told, was close to tears. When Molyneux returned, he faced the full wrath of a stressed and exhausted development team. The Carters raised their flame shields. Don't worry, they said. We'll work it out.

Molyneux has a reputation for causing all sorts of problems for those who work for him. If he's not announcing a new feature for a game due out in a few months, he's tearing up already completed work. There are many examples of this throughout Lionhead's life. They are not pretty.

According to three separate sources familiar with Lionhead's relationship with Microsoft in 2012, Xbox executives insisted the studio make a new Fable in the games as a service mould. A single-player focused role-playing game would not be allowed, Lionhead was told. "There's no way anybody's going to be making single-player boxed products any more," sources say Microsoft executives told Lionhead. "I want something that's games as a service."

"You make a service game or you get closed down," was how another source with knowledge of the conversations remembers them. "It was the new big push from Microsoft and I heard that all first party studios got a similar message, however some had more of a push back against it."

[gimymblert]

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=38504.0
post it here

[s0]

"They were going, you can't have a black person on the cover, and you can't have a woman. And you want a black woman. And I was like, yes, I do, because it's about be whatever hero you want. No. It's a white guy. That's just the way it is. We know what sells and that's fucking it. Stop the arguing. I was like, fuck you! That was a huge fight.

i wonder if the people who get upset about "sjws forcing their agenda into games" are also going to be outraged about this.

[gimymblert]

[2mass]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-12-lionhead-the-inside-story
  MAD

I once had to deal with some of the chieftains in Microsoft over some web stuff I've developed. My experience was in brief; that one hand didn't know what the other one was doing. And nobody knew who was the actual boss (post-gates-era). I wasted about half a year on communicating with Microsoft, really.

[2mass]

Worth noting about Microsoft, is that the faster they finish a new version or product, the more holiday do they get.

Result..

[gimymblert]

They have no one to copy and run out of business anymore, they actually have to innovate and learn about consumer need at the same time.

[2mass]

They have no one to copy and run out of business anymore, they actually have to innovate and learn about consumer need at the same time.

That's by far the funniest bit, they spent BILLIONS on innovation, yet.. Not much have happened since the Amiga Workbench..



Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's a window(s) anno 198X.

[gimymblert]

They have some market locked though ... almost ...

When they make innovative product to the market they tend to overhype it and under design it, then ababon it for the next shiny toy. Kinect had problem but it was potentially revolutionary, so instead of fixing it to meet actual demand they made it shinier but with the same problem, then they jump to hololens which they make shinier and not listen to the complain people have (low fov) because they have the shinier hi quality image resolution using complex and expensive holographic screen nobody care about because it doesn't improve functionality ... But they fix the kinect tracking latency issue but didn't back port it to kinect where actual application needed, in the process they tank the PR of the whole tech because it's not shiny enough to make seem like 1337 h4x0r. Meanwhile apple became richer than them by iterating slowly around consumer need (ipod and ipad where not overnight success) ... until jobs die and they are becoming slowly like m$ whil samsung do what they use to do, less smartly (not everybody is steve) but doing it nonetheless ...

[2mass]

They have some market locked though ... almost ...

When they make innovative product to the market they tend to overhype it and under design it, then ababon it for the next shiny toy. Kinect had problem but it was potentially revolutionary, so instead of fixing it to meet actual demand they made it shinier but with the same problem, then they jump to hololens which they make shinier and not listen to the complain people have (low fov) because they have the shinier hi quality image resolution using complex and expensive holographic screen nobody care about because it doesn't improve functionality ... But they fix the kinect tracking latency issue but didn't back port it to kinect where actual application needed, in the process they tank the PR of the whole tech because it's not shiny enough to make seem like 1337 h4x0r. Meanwhile apple became richer than them by iterating slowly around consumer need (ipod and ipad where not overnight success) ... until jobs die and they are becoming slowly like m$ whil samsung do what they use to do, less smartly (not everybody is steve) but doing it nonetheless ...

Anyone who hasn't applied a new shiny feature before fixing the latest bug, may throw the first rock

Actually, what microsoft probably needs to do, is to tell people they are hip for using their products like apple does "Think different".. "You're intelligent if you use our product".. i this and i that.. etc., I personally can't stand apples way of talking down to people.. Makes their products hard to separate from snakeoil, in my mind.. It's an encyclopedia salesman trick..  Yet, they tend to have success with it..



I blame this on the decline in the Flynn-effect tho.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression

As people become less intelligent worldwide, more people will buy "intelligence" from Apple and other encyclopedia salesmen.

[gimymblert]

I don't like apple either I avoid them, and I'm trying to tie all dependency from m$ too

But you forget about the newton, the original ipad!

The thing is that apple didn't have JUST a nice marketing, they made things uncomplex and approachable, hence the whole skeuemorphism they were mocked for and promptly forget allowing other to took their market share.

That's key, put the consummer need at the center. That is if you are comparing market success, complex unwieldy stuff are still available for the geek nerd. I'm jumping to linux at the first occasion.

[Dacke]

I install simple, accessible linux distros for all tech-newbs I have to help. It's a pretty perfect match. It's genuinely free, designed without ulterior motives (like tricking you into buying subscriptions to shitty services), all software can auto-update from reliable repositories and it's pretty fool-proof with respect to viruses/malware.

[2mass]

I don't like apple either I avoid them, and I'm trying to tie all dependency from m$ too

But you forget about the newton, the original ipad!

The thing is that apple didn't have JUST a nice marketing, they made things uncomplex and approachable, hence the whole skeuemorphism they were mocked for and promptly forget allowing other to took their market share.

That's key, put the consummer need at the center. That is if you are comparing market success, complex unwieldy stuff are still available for the geek nerd. I'm jumping to linux at the first occasion.

Hehe, not much of an ipad or tablet pc, that newton was it tho I had a similar one, one that could also fold and lock, with a pen.. I think it was texas instruments or something

Totally agree with you on the approachable bit concerning apple. It's just so ironic that they market themselves for intelligent people..



When their actual target audience is people who can't compute and are best off with one click solutions so that they can't mess up the system too much.

[2mass]

In other news, then I mean no harm to apple users. I just always had a grunge against that company because I grew up with these apple commercials that were hard to separate from German candy commercials of the 80s. They really talked to people as if they were idiots in the 80s. And I must admit that it pissed me off back then, and it still does lol

Whether apple is worse than any other hardware or software product to this day and age, I dunno, I don't use it and have only used macs when I studied graphics and stuff at various schools. I think we're often best set with what we're started off with perhaps, like a duckling saying hi to its momma, and as long as it gets the job done, then the tools must be of secondary concern.

[gimymblert]

I grew up with apple and the jump to pc was depressing, availability of soft I needed where hard to get on apple. But apple kind of diverge over the years, it's an ex, and want to get rid of m$ because the relation was never great to begin with and it sours over the year, and since he broke with essential application, I see no reason to stay anymore.

[2mass]

I grew up with apple and the jump to pc was depressing, availability of soft I needed where hard to get on apple. But apple kind of diverge over the years, it's an ex, and want to get rid of m$ because the relation was never great to begin with and it sours over the year, and since he broke with essential application, I see no reason to stay anymore.

Here's a glimpse of my first "OS"..



I guess I should be a sucker for Ubuntu Minimal huh

Alas, half the tools I use for games and music today, are windows only. By support anyway. So I guess I'm stuck until I decide to re-learn a lot of programs *shakes cane at gates*

[Dacke]

What tools we use does matter, because it's our infrastructure. If amoral/evil corps (like apple/ms/google/facebook) control the infrastructure and our information, they gain immense power in shaping what we think of as possible, our habits, what information we get subjected to, uphold certain invisible power structures, controlling which people are in a position to create new software (the main reasons why I absolutely detest apple). It's a pretty darn big deal.

[2mass]

What tools we use does matter, because it's our infrastructure. If amoral/evil corps (like apple/ms/google/facebook) control the infrastructure and our information, they gain immense power in shaping what we think of as possible, our habits, what information we get subjected to, uphold certain invisible power structures, controlling which people are in a position to create new software (the main reasons why I absolutely detest apple). It's a pretty darn big deal.

Yea? That just leaves one crucial question behind.

What would these rebels use?

[gimymblert]

Peasant - "I hate feudalism"

Aristocrate - "do you realize that the food you eat and the clothes you wear has been made under feudalism? You know nothing"

[Impmaster]

hehe that's funny gimymblert