The sudden announcement yesterday that Microsoft was shutting Lionhead came as a surprise to everyone, not least to Lionhead itself which was apparently completely unaware as little as a few hours before. It wasn't the only developer affected though, with Max: The Curse of Brotherhood studio Press Play also having a pillow gently pressed to its face.
However, as noted by Videogamer, it looks like that's not the end of it. The Microsoft Studios website looked like this on March the 4th:
Today, it looks like this:
The missing names include the following:
BigPark - a Canadian developer responsible for Kinect Games
[Fun]tion studios - a 'medium size incubation team' working on Kinect and, more recently, Hololens stuff.
Good Science - another Kinect studio
Leap Experience Pioneers - also known as LXP, another studio working on Kinect
SOTA - otherwise known as State Of The Art with no known projects
The key thing is that these are all in-house teams established almost simultaneously by Microsoft around the end of 2014. At the time it was seen by many as a push by the publisher to create a stronger first party presence. None of these studios seems to have anything to their names however other than a few Kinect projects, if anything, and it looks like that particular idea is now over.
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