Following on the success of the original Fable, Lionhead’s Fable II went on to sell over 3.5 million copies, making it one of the best-selling RPGs on the Xbox 360. Microsoft and Lionhead boss Peter Molyneux have high hopes that Fable III will fare even better. In fact, according to GI.biz, Microsoft is aiming for sales of 5 million units and a profit of about $150 million on the game.

With the cost of triple-A game development being so high these days, Molyneux was rather realistic about his sales goal, commenting, “We have to do that because if a franchise doesn’t reach that level it will inevitably wither.”

Another aspect of reaching that 5 million sales target is to make the game more accessible, Molyneux said. Apparently, over 60% of Fable II players understood and used less than 50% of the game’s features. ”About 30 percent of people that played Fable II were women,” Molyneux explained, adding that Lionhead is also on the lookout for more female employees. ”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 game[r]s who probably want to get involved as well.”

In addition to broadening the audience, Fable III will also continue to be on the digital forefront. In a business model that IndustryGamers believes is likely to become more and more prevalent, Lionhead intends to release Fable III not only at retail but in full episodes for download. And to suck players in and incentivize a purchase, the first hour of gameplay is free. “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,” Molyneux stated. “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.”

Molyneux noted how making the first chapter free is a superior idea to building a separate demo for the title. “It supports this freemium idea. It gets around this horrible concept of demos. Anyone out there who thinks a demo is a good idea is crazy. It’s never a good idea, because demos are usually done at the end of a game and they require an enormous amount of design talent to make a demo. The other thing is you’re more likely to satisfying the curiosity of a user rather than entice them to play more,” he explained.

This is not the first time that Fable will see an episodic release. Lionhead turned Fable II into an episodic downloadable title nine months after its retail release. Its first episode saw 1.6 million downloads, and all the episodes earned $15 million in contribution margins combined.