Yet another high profile developer has been snapped up by a publisher this week, with Microsoft shelling out to buy Lionhead, creator of Fable and The Movies.

As we reported a month ago, Lionhead have recently made a round of redundancies after their latest titles failed to live up to expectations, so the sale to Microsoft will probably be a good thing for the company in terms of stability for future growth. No figure has been disclosed as to the cost of the sale, but given the afore mentioned difficulties Lionhead faced it’s assumed that Microsoft may have landed themselves somewhat of a bargain.

One of the big reasons for the sale is likely to be Fable, which was one of the biggest selling XBox games and is due a sequel, so obviously Microsoft will have wanted to safeguard the future of this particular title.

Let’s just hope Peter Molyneux, founder of Lionhead, sticks around a bit longer this time! He left his previous company, Bullfrog (developer of classics such as Populous and Syndicate Wars) after selling it to EA, complaining that he was now spending more time in meetings than actually creating games. Bullfrog really lost it’s identity after being bought by EA, since all the main guiding lights of the company left soon after Molyneux’s departure to set up their own new companies. Bullfrog’s final game before being renamed as just another part of EA was the PS2 port of Quake, a far cry from the originality prevalent in the companies other games. It seems unlikely that Lionhead will suffer the same fate as Bullfrog, since Microsoft are a completely different company to EA, and are more open to daughter companies working in their own manner.

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