Something else happened in 2012: former Sony executive Phil Harrison joined Microsoft as corporate vice president in charge of its European game development efforts. Harrison has a long history in the games industry  he is a part of the story of a great many high-profile games of the last two decades  and he had a very clear vision for where games were going. Phil passionately believed in games-as-service: in other words, long-tail online games that evolved with their player bases, and were probably free-to-play. This belief would be what determined Lionheads direction (and, judging by Sea of Thieves, Rares too)...

Phil Harrisons vision for all of his studios in Europe was now for service-based games. Thats what he thought was the future of games. He didnt want to make anything that was a £50 box, fire and forget. He wanted long tails of revenue, even if there was a smaller up-front burst of revenue.



Harrison had a vision for the future where everything was games as a service, says another. I think many parts of Microsoft really struggled with that approach, despite the fact that Windows 10 was going in that direction. Harrison absolutely did not want a boxed product.



Given Harrisons background, this approach was understandable. Between his stints at Microsoft and Sony, he had been special advisor for a company called London Venture Partners, which invested in new business models in the gaming world and counted Supercell as one of its early seed investments. He had seen, close-up, how successful games-as-service could be. Lionhead had to come up with something that would fit the model.