Oh Wow....

A sad day for the employees of Lionhead and the franchise. We'll likely not see what a Post-Molyneux Fable would be like. And, just a few doors down, Moly and 22Cans are still (assumedly) churning away on, uh, things?

Agreed, Lionhead closing was inevitably going to happen, and the writing should have been on the wall for all involved:

1. Neglecting the core title of an IP to crap out weak spin-offs - I have no sympathy for this, as it's usually lazy design given the marketing excuse of "expanding an audience" but usually just serves as a reason for the neglected/exploited fans to be rightfully irate at the treatment.
2. Lionhead hasn't really had a decent game since...2008? Fable III onward has just been a mess of a money pit for MS, especially with trying to get that Milo mock-up to actually work.
3. Torn was a title that BIS/Interplay were working on in the early 2000s. All it took was one stupid quote from Feargus Urquhart to completely destroy it: "Torn is everything Fallout fans have been expecting since Fallout 2." when that would have rightfully been "Fallout 3" the fans were looking for and Interplay screwed up repeatedly the production of in favour of chasing crappy spin-offs.

www.fablelegends.com/what-is-fable-legends
"Uniting thrilling stories, exciting combat and heroic quests with the next generation capabilities of the Xbox One and Windows 10 PC, Fable Legends is the forthcoming adventure in the genre defining series Fable."

To then offer something that only superficially resembled the gameplay folks enjoyed of Fable, so that even IGN could point out that the title bears little to no resemblance to the original gameplay people might have expected, someone at Microsoft realised this before it cost them any more and finally closed up the money pit.

"That may not be the Fable you know and love, but it may just be an experience worth having anyway."  - too much of a gamble in today's market that is becoming increasingly dissatisfied with this kind of thing happening to their beloved titles.  This is particularly so when the intro page makes a remark about a "genre defining series"...and the title isn't even in the same genre anymore and there hasn't been a title in that genre for five years!*

Oh, and the reception to it being a Pay Or Be Grind Fodder model might have had something to do with it...

Good luck to the obvious talent that were being wasted by poor direction, design, and - more importantly - misplaced hype; this is a case where the industry can and rightfully has seen how the studio's management mucked things up really badly.

* - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH...

*gasps in another breath*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

(Not even fans of the series, those who have been waiting for a REAL Fable game, are that delusional - they might like the series or a couple of the games, but Fable was by no means genre-defining unless you counted the definition of disappointment in development.)