Fable III Must Sell 5 Million Units and Earn Massive Profits… or Else

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering why Lionhead Studios’ Peter Molyneux keeps downplaying the RPG elements in Fable III, I think this article on GamesIndustry.biz (registration required) has your answer. I’m not sure why a $150 million profit is required for success these days, but such steep goals will apparently force you to change your title’s genre and make you do crazy things like split it up into episodic parts:

Positioning the sequel as more of an action-adventure than an RPG, he said it was a deliberate attempt to reach a wider audience.

“We are driving to sell more than five million units and to make a profit in excess of $150 million,” he said. “We have to do that because if a franchise doesn’t reach that level it will inevitably wither.”

Part of this strategy would involve selling the game as downloadable episodes, said Molyneux. “Soon after the retail launch we’re doing episodic. We break it down in chapters. We give away the first chapter entirely free, the first hour. When you reach a certain point in the game it says ‘thank you for playing the pilot of Fable 3, do you want to spend an extra 2-5 or whatever dollars to buy the next episode, or buy the whole lot?’ Press ‘yes’ and you will immediately continue playing.”

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“The reason we’re doing this is really trying to bring a wider audience into the Fable franchise, because my suspicion is there are a lot of people who are the partners of core games who probably want to get involved as well.” Almost half the Milo team are women, he added.

Highlighting Fable III’s social and micro-transaction features, he accused this year’s E3 of being “weirdly and bizarrely kind of not relevant. There wasn’t much there in the space of social gaming.”

He also joked that Fable III’s Kinect features, which enable a gamer to reach out and ‘cup’ another player’s avatar, would gain the game 100,000 sales in Europe but lose 100,000 in the US.

I can wager a guess, but do I really want to know what “cupping” another player’s avatar means?