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Lionhead hit with layoffs after latest Fable release
by John Keefer, Oct 16, 2012 1:05pm PDTNo sooner does Fable: The Journey hit shelves to lackluster reviews than UK developer Lionhead Studios faces staff reductions. Despite the layoffs, Microsoft insists that another 100 people will be hired by June of next year.
"Following the completion of Fable: The Journey, Lionhead Studios has begun work on its next projects," read a statement from Microsoft to Develop. "As is common in the games industry, a smaller headcount is needed as projects kick-off and ramp up as full-production gets underway. At this time a small number of positions have been identified as at risk of redundancy and the affected employees were notified today."
Without giving an exact count, Microsoft spun the numbers to say "the reduction in staff would account for less than ten percent of the overall headcount at Lionhead by the end of 2012," Develop said. Microsoft is working with those affected to find them other positions at MS studios in the UK, if possible.
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No sooner does Fable: The Journey hit shelves and developer Lionhead Studios is facing staff reductions. Despite the layoffs, Microsoft insists that another 100 people will be hired by June of next year.
No sooner does Fable: The Journey hit shelves and developer Lionhead Studios is facing staff reductions. Despite the layoffs, Microsoft insists that another 100 people will be hired by June of next year. : Shacknews
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Other reasons are thingies like there is no centralized city like "hollywood" where everybody works because the industry is not glamorous enough to force or compel people to move to a single location, and also many of the talents required are not singular to the industry. So you have artists and programmers who had to come from other industries that used to live all over the world that dont want to relocate. Because game teams only recently came from very small team sizes, there is still a desire and necessity for small team cohesion and team input, whereas a key grip on a movie set does not suggest script changes to the screenwriter. So most teams want to remain a single cohesive unit. The branding of creator authorship has always been company oriented rather than the director oriented nature of Hollywood, so there is a need to cultivate teams rather than cultivating directors.Also game production is messier than film, both due to the complex nature of producing interactive with changing technologies, and due to incompetence and immaturity of production scheduling, so coordinating with outsourced production companies is a difficult balancing act that many companies shunned. Middleware used to be a similar way to decentralize development but as companies consolidated into massive first party efforts, middleware becomes less efficient than horizontal integration of internal company-wide middleware across many first party studios. And as the software focus becomes increasingly about backends and servers to support service based games like League of Legends and Call of Duty, the need for upkeep and maintenance keeps a lot of software focus internal.
BUT almost all of these things are changing and in fact, the industry has already sort of become more decentralized through the heavy use of outsourcing and contractors. It will never become as decentralized as Hollywood because the production cycles do not favor creative outsourcing such as directors or screenwriters signing picture deal contracts.
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