Fable was profitable - “highly profitable”, Lionhead’s Simon Carter told Eurogamer - but in a now too-familiar story, it and its genre was seen by Microsoft as just not profitable enough. “That category is not the biggest category on the planet,” said Robbie Bach, who was the President of Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft before Don Mattrick assumed the role. “It’s not soccer. It’s not American Football. It’s not a first-person shooter sized category. So at a commercial level, I would say it was successful, but not wildly so.”
Wildly successful was what Microsoft was after. A pitch for Fable 4 was rejected. “It was like, you’ve reached your cap of players for RPG on Xbox and you need to find a way to double that, and you’re not going to do it with RPG,” Fable’s art director John McCormack told Eurogamer at the time. “I thought, yes we can. I said, look, just give us four years, proper finance, give us the chance Mass Effect has, Skyrim has, the games at the time. They’re getting four years and a lot of budget. Give us that, and we’ll give you something that’ll get you your players. Nah, you’ve had three shots and you’ve only tripled the money. It’s not good enough. Fuck off. That’s what I was annoyed about.” (Worth noting: Skyrim went on to sell 63m copies, as of June 2023, The Witcher 3 over 50m.)
It’s not enough to make more money than last year.
You’ve got to make more money and at a faster rate of increase than last year, every single year, or else as far as the execs are concerned, you’re a fucking failure. Hence, everything getting worse, more expensive, and generally shittier all the time.
Good quote. Here is more of it for context:
Just absolutely greedy fucks that think entropy doesn’t exist and everything infinitely scales.
What is wild to me is that profit alone isn’t sufficient.
Like. You’re paying people to do a thing and you’re getting more money back.
Why shutter it?
Like oh no I can’t make MORE money off of this might as well make nothing?
It’s not enough to make money.
It’s not enough to make more money than last year.
You’ve got to make more money and at a faster rate of increase than last year, every single year, or else as far as the execs are concerned, you’re a fucking failure. Hence, everything getting worse, more expensive, and generally shittier all the time.