As a person who plays Online Multiplayer games before, That is quite insulting :P

As far as I'm concerned, Lionhead never made any good games (I didn't like either Black&White or the Fable games), so I couldn't care less about them being closed down.

Whether it's EA or Microsoft, I don't see why people are angry at a company for closing studios that aren't delivering games that make money. Companies are all about the bottom line, that's just a fact and nothing worth raging about.

Right, LH had not done much of anything in a while so it makes sense to close it down.

Those other guys though, it was like kneecapping a marathon runner close to the finish line.

You have to wonder why devs/studio's sign up with them, knowing full well things like those could entirely happen to with them -- far more chance than with other publishers...

Sometimes the devs/studio reach the end of the rope and there is no choice left.Sign or go bankrupt.

Like Obsidian is this close to bankrupt before Pillars of Eternity crowdfunding save the day.

CD Projekt also was this close to bankrupt but they refuse to sign with a publisher and relinquish creative control and survived.

Yet for a few success stories, the number of failures should be 10 times if not 100 times.

Almost forgot about the Obsidian thing. Im curious as to what games of theirs were cancelled? I thought Stick of Truth was the big one they had going and from what i can tell it did pretty well?.....Having said that... surely there are better choices for studios and devs aside from the two evil entities mentioned...

some times EA microsoft or activision are the only ones with the capital at hand and willing to invest

The article has a link to it.
The Aliens: Crucible RPG
Then AC which are taken by another company to become Aliens: Colonial Marines
Snow White RPG
Dwarves
Alpha Protocol 2

When Peter Molyneaux left, I was surprised Lionhead did not get closed right away. Whenever original founders and employees at these game studios leave, it seems like the studio goes into a different direction that makes something else. An example includes Team Ninja after Itagaki and much of the original staff left after Tecmo screwed them over several years ago.

I played Fable: The Lost Chapters on original Xbox and both Fable 2 and Fable 3 on the Xbox 360 and I really enjoyed those games. The first Fable had the best combat system while Fable 2 and Fable 3 improved almost everything else. I remember being really addicted to Fable 2 in college and loving the idea of turning an orphanage into a whorehouse in Fable 3 (for a good cause though).

Hopefully there will be future Fable games or something like it but better.

And the curtains have now fallen on Lionhead Studios. Let's see whether Microsoft will bother to do anything with the company's games.

Fable 2 was great. One of the most memorable games I've ever played.
I kept hoping for a sequel to match but never got one. They completely lost direction after Fable 2.
It's a shame they fell for the allure of online multiplayer, the quickest way to ruin a franchise or game.

They should have gone back to what actually worked and done a single-player game in vein of Fable 2.
It's like I always say, forcing a single-player concept and into multiplayer form will ruin it.
If you are going to make a multiplayer game do it fresh, from the ground up.

Aye it’s been made official now, the Lionhead website is gone. I wrote about one of their lesser known games The Movies because the impact of the online portion has been somewhat forgotten:

http://techraptor.net/content/celebrating-lionhead

Before they were purchased by Microsoft and became exclusive to Fable, Lionhead made three great games - The Movies, Fable TLC, and Black & White. The Movies had a really simple in-game toolset to create machinima and had a whole online infrastructure set up to support it. Fable TLC was like British Zelda, which is just about the sexiest thing I can imagine. Black & White was the Tamagotchi we all wanted, with impressive AI for the time. I cherish the memories these games gave me.

well that was a "HUGE" surprise