Microsoft, at this point, drips gore from head to toe. The megacorp has made a hobby of shuttering studios and laying off thousands of devs, in attempt after attempt to right the listing ship of its games business. No luck yet, on that front.
You might wonder how Playground’s upcoming Fable reboot, in the works for a decade now, has evaded its parent company’s reign of terror. In a chat with The Guardian, Playground co-founder and Fable director Ralph Fulton offered up a pretty simple explanation: Fable’s just that important.
“I genuinely think Fable is an important game,” said Fulton. “What has protected us over a long development cycle is that so many people within Xbox view Fable as vital to the DNA of the platform.” That is to say, Fable is a potent Xbox brand, like Halo or Gears of War, and that’s protected it from the chop.
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It fits the pattern of Microsoft’s studio closures. Though the end of studios like Arkane Austin (rest in peace), Tango Gameworks (before it was picked up by Krafton) and others felt brutal, they didn’t strike at the heart of that amorphous thing you might call the Xbox brand. It did not claim the life of any character you might see plastered on a banner or standee at a Microsoft Gamescom booth.
Honestly? I might not have instinctually put Fable in that bracket, but I can see why you might, and in that light I can believe that Xbox execs would be timid about hurting it. Fulton, mind you, doesn’t just think Fable’s importance starts and stops at Xbox: “I would go a step further and say it’s important to video games as a whole. It offers a combination of elements that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else.” Ironically, I suspect that wider importance matters less to games industry execs.
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