As our colleagues over on the Technology blog reported earlier, Microsoft has just purchased Lionhead Studios. Peter Molyneux's team will now be creating content exclusively for the Xbox 360 and PC, I mean, Microsoft® Windows platforms.
Many in the industry see this as something of a gamble for Microsoft. As Jack Schofield writes, "Lionhead's recent games, such as The Movies, have not been selling as well as was hoped, and last month the studio laid off 50 staff and cut back on future developments". However, there were similarly raised eyebrows in 2002 when the Seattle mega-corp bought Rare, the UK developer responsible for GoldenEye, but at that time going through something of a fallow period. Since then Rare has produced two successful Xbox 360 titles: Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo.
It could be that the financial security and added discipline of complete ownership gave Rare more focus. Certainly Lionhead could benefit from a more finely honed development structure. However, Peter Molyneux soon left Bullfrog after it was bought out by EA, apparently bored by his new, more management-based role, and perhaps disenfranchised with the emphasis on titles with obvious commercial appeal.
Well, we know that Lionhead has been working on a surreal physics demo known as The Room, and is also toying with a massively ambitious project in which the player somehow gets to re-live their own teenage years. Surely, though, Microsoft, like EA, will be looking for a few mainstream big hitters - a couple of Black and White sequels, and an Xbox 360 outing for Fable are probably first on the menu. The question is, will Molyneux hang around for the main course?
