Games as a service is a somewhat abstract term that seems to mean a game that is designed to be updated continually post release. It's probably free to play. Circa 2012, games as a service was all the rage: League of Legends, the biggest game in the world, is the quintessential game as a service.
According to three separate sources familiar with Lionhead's relationship with Microsoft in 2012, Xbox executives insisted the studio make a new Fable in the games as a service mould. A single-player focused role-playing game would not be allowed, Lionhead was told. "There's no way anybody's going to be making single-player boxed products any more," sources say Microsoft executives told Lionhead. "I want something that's games as a service."
"You make a service game or you get closed down," was how another source with knowledge of the conversations remembers them. "It was the new big push from Microsoft and I heard that all first party studios got a similar message, however some had more of a push back against it."
Microsoft declined Eurogamer's request for an interview for this feature.
Alongside this push for games as a service was Microsoft's long-running desire to make more money from the Fable franchise. Fable was profitable, Molyneux and Webley insist, but not as profitable as some of the other first-party franchises, such as Halo.
"That category is not the biggest category on the planet," Robbie Bach, who was the President of Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft before Don Mattrick came in, says. "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."
"As a first-party title one of our big responsibilities was strategic, to make a unique, innovative experience that a third party couldn't risk making, which would make people want to buy an Xbox, and thus drive hardware sales," Simon Carter explains.
"However, we were also under pressure to be enormously profitable. To be clear, Fable 1, 2 and 3 were highly profitable, despite the somewhat protracted developments of Fable 1 and 2, but not being as profitable as one or two of Microsoft's other properties created a certain amount of tension."
It was in this context that a pitch for a Fable 4 game was rejected. John McCormack was the chief architect of the pitch. He wanted to switch to Unreal Engine 4 and move the series into the technological, industrial age, with tram cars and flying machines. "We wanted to hit the late Victorian proper far out Jules Verne shit," McCormack says.
In the first Fable, Bowerstone was a small town. In Fable 2 it was a big town. In Fable 3 it was a city. In McCormack's Fable 4, Bowerstone was London, vast and dense. Jack the Ripper would run the streets, a Balverine in disguise.
The game would lean heavily on British mythology. McCormack planned to take Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, give them a Fable twist and drop them in "this kind of weird fucked up London environment".
"And that was going to be Fable 4, and it would be darker and grittier. And because it was R-rated it would have the prostitutes and the humour. I was like, man, this is going to be fucking brilliant, and everybody was really into it."
Well, not everyone. The pitch was rejected because Lionhead had to switch to making games as a service.
McCormack was incensed by the decision, and says it was one of the reasons he left the company in 2012. "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," he says. "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."
