> Fable was profitable - "highly profitable", Lionhead's Simon Carter told Eurogamer - but in a now too-familiar story, it and its genre was seen by Microsoft as just not profitable enough.

I suppose this is as good an explanation as any. The old story with point-and-click adventure games (which "died" in the late 90s) is that their sales never significantly declined, they just got massively outstripped by flashier action games starting with the likes of DOOM.

All the outcry from the studio closure may eventually turn out to be wrong. We don't know the real reasons those studios were shut down.