Microsoft Closes Redfall Developer Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush Developer Tango Gameworks, and More in Devastating Cuts at Bethesda ( www.ign.com )

Affected devs:

  • Arkane Austin (closed)
  • Tango Gameworks (closed)
  • Alpha Dog Studios (closed)
  • Roundhouse Games (absorbed into ZeniMax Online Studios)

These changes are grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games and beloved worlds which you have nurtured over many decades.

Supervivens ,

Just a reminder that buying this game no longer supports the devs

Sail the seas friends

Fedizen ,

allowing the deal to happen was a big mistake.

paultimate14 ,

I wonder how many promises Microsoft made to the FCC and other regulators about how their mergers and acquisitions wouldn't result in layoffs?

Sam_Bass ,

ooh, EA has competition

SuperSaiyanSwag ,

This is a meme at this point right? I can’t remember the last time EA actually did anything remotely as bad.

RadimentriX ,
@RadimentriX@troet.cafe avatar

@SuperSaiyanSwag @Sam_Bass yep. Its more like "ubisoft got competition"

Sam_Bass ,

EA has been famous for buying up game studios only to shut them down shortly after back in the 90s

SuperSaiyanSwag ,

Yes, I know that, but they haven’t done anything egregious in quite some time. Microsoft, Sony, Take-two, Embracer and Activision have been been making a lot worse headlines for the last few years now.

Vipsu ,
@Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly all these tech layoffs could really come bite back publishers and the big tech in the near future.
Theres a lot new talent for competitors to snatch and fraction of these developers might even form up new studios to make the next big thing.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

I see no mention of Emil Pagliarulo's head rolling. Still worried about Elder Scrolls 6

Fuck you, Microshit.

Shadywack ,
@Shadywack@lemmy.world avatar

I never played Hi-Fi rush, Redfall, Mighty Doom, or The Evil Within. That said it looks like Tango hit their sales and quality strides. Alpha Dog and their Mighty Doom shit-ware deserves the dust bin and closure.

As cold and callous as this all sounds, I read about the Redfall development and it was leadership start to finish on that disaster. The employees, even at Alpha Dog, don't deserve this treatment. Dinga Bakaba from Arkane Lyon stated it perfectly

Don't throw us into gold fever gambits, don't use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don't make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.

Fuck me, this part hurts the most, and I highly recommend anyone who didn't read the article at least look at what was said here. Everyone knows damn well that the corporation has the ability to flourish in keeping all the talented workers who got fucked by shitty leadership, instead the leadership will fail upward and keep ruining projects. Companies have so many chances to really disrupt and show the world a better way and they continually take shallow short sighted routes to cheap monetary victory, discarding humanity along the way. Fuck companies.

shani66 ,

We all know this was completely necessary at any level, but why the hifi guys? Aren't they the best bets you could hope to invest in? They make good games that sell decently with less investment than AAA massive failures need.

Thatuserguy ,

I'm honestly ready to not support Xbox anymore after this. They've been non-stop fumbling the ball with game releases this generation. Hi-Fi Rush was the first game that came out that I felt was phenomenal and such a breathe of fresh air, and they just straight killed the studio anyways. Killing studios that make good games is not how you foster a gaming platform people want to be part of.

thesmokingman ,

Robert Altman continues to fuck people with that sale

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

From the grave

thesmokingman ,

I’m not gonna lie I found he died today when I was double-checking the spelling with a quick google. I then had to check the timeline to make sure he was actually involved in the sale.

Basically selling user data from BNET didn’t work out and after the year of flops the board got antsy. Still blame Altman tho.

simple ,
@simple@lemm.ee avatar

What the fuck? I understand Arkane Austin since they dropped the ball, but why Tango Gameworks? I was secretly hoping they'd make another game like Hi-Fi Rush...

Blackmist ,

If you ever wonder why gamers buy Playstation and not Xbox, here is your reason.

MS have no idea what they're doing with gaming. There will be no The Last of Us or God of War coming from them. They don't want to sell you games. They want to sell you GamePass. They don't want you to have a great time. They want you to have a time that is just about acceptable enough to keep paying for it.

The only one of their games I've heard people get excited about is Hi-Fi Rush, and you can see here what they think of that. Clearly it didn't maintain enough Monthly Active Users, or have a short enough Time To Purchase or whatever other bullshit mobile-era metric determines whether a studio lives or dies.

NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

And this is WHY the smaller studios are on the chopping block and not core Bethesda.

Because smaller games that are incredibly solid don't matter. What matters are AAA tentpoles. And Tango's A/AA games were "lukewarm" at best. They had an AMAZING B/A game but fuck 'em. Same with Arkane Austin

And... probably same with Obsidian this fall (?) when their Elder Pillars game comes out and people decide it isn't Skyrim so it is bad. Ignore that Pentiment was amazing or their long legacy as one of the best studios in CRPGs. People will just talk doom and gloom because it isn't The Last Of Us.

Which will lead to MS continuing to try to be Sony rather than take advantage of the studios they actually have. And people will continue to talk about how they can't compete with Sony because they don't have a Horizon Zero Dawn.

I've been saying it ever since MS started buying every studio they could. They have an AMAZING roster and can basically dominate the market by "flooding" it with high production value "indie" games. But... people want their AAA tentpoles.

Ilflish ,

This is such a fanboy opinion. Sony killed basically their entire Japanese Development, had 13 GaaS in development at the same time and actively are holding back the standard of Cross Save. They give plenty of reasons to not be the 'gamer' console. Especially now when they are also beginning to drop games on gamepass.

Ironically we still know of more single player games coming to Xbox then games coming to Sony outside of Spider-Man Leaks.

Fallout is currently the hottest game on the market thanks to the Show on top of this.

This really fucking sucks but damn stop trying to use this as a way to promote your team

shani66 ,

Yeah sony hasn't been the gaming juggernaut that guy remembers in a very long time.

Stovetop ,

If anything, Nintendo is likely the company about to make lightning strike twice with the Switch successor due to be announced this year. Will be interesting to see what it's like, but no matter the case, it is going to sell like hotcakes.

paultimate14 ,

What are you talking about?

Sony's Japan studio's own library was always gimmicky games that were basically tech demos- Ape Escape was for the Dual Analog controller, LocoRoco for the PSP, Gravity Rush for the Vita, Knack to be a pack-in for the PS4, and games for VR, Move Eye toy, etc. In fact it's kind of hard to find games they did on their own because they've always been mostly a support studio even going back to the PS1's launch lineup, and they are continuing that. There have been several studios that make original games that started as part of Sony Japan that have been spun off into separate teams too.

I'm struggling to think of many studios Sony has closed. Sony London studios was similar to Japan- mostly just games to go with hardware gimmicks like the EyeToy, SingStar, and Wonderbook. It's even harder to find studios that Sony has purchased and then closed or turned into a support studio- I guess you could count that Psygnosis was purchased and merged into London studios back in the 90's, but considering they went 20 years between that merger and closing I doubt there were many Psygnosis devs left there.

A quick search pulls up PixelOpus, a tiny studio Sony formed from 9 college grads with a couple of industry veterans to lead them They released 2 small games and were closed last year.

I don't mean to be too defensive of Sony- they did close one of their own studios and laid off ~900 people this year. But it's not really a comparison to Microsoft who now has a long history of buying 3rd party studios, mismanaging them, and closing them.

I'm also confused about your comment about Xbox making more single player games than Sony. First of all... I would expect that to generally be true. It looks like Sony owns 21 studios while Microsoft had 40 as of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. And while a lot hasn't been announcedwith release dates, we know of a handful of single player games Sony has in the works- Horizon 3, TLOU3, Ghosts of Tsushima 2, and new IP's from Bend, Housemarq, and BluePoint. Plus Wolverine, and you could argue whether Physint should count or not since that's a partnership between Kojima and Sony-owned Columbia Pictures. If you're trying to imply that Sony is abandoning single-player games or something that's pretty far from the truth.

ArmokGoB ,

We don't talk about how they racked up hundreds of thousands of negative reviews in three days last week with their shitty business decisions.

StoneyDcrew ,

Seeing Tango go is actually hurtful.
Hi-fi rush was a great IP and had the potential for a great sequel if given the chance.

(I feel they wrapped it up nicely but left it open enough for a sequel.)

I hope the employees can continue making great games elsewhere but it's sad we will never see them develop the IP further.

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

I'm sure there will be a headcount of how many people will be leaving/fired.

But from the sounds of it, they are folding game devs into other teams.

Stern ,
@Stern@lemmy.world avatar

Arkane- I mean, yeah Redfall was a clunker but Dishonored, Deathloop, and Prey all did pretty well I thought... though I suppose the two Wolfenstein games they did were kinda trash so there is a bit of falloff between the "glory days" and now.

Tango- Hi-Fi Rush was a bop, and Ghostwire did well enough I thought. Not seeing a good reason here.

Alpha Dog - Mighty Doom? Okay thats a fair closure.

--

prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games

Chasing blockbusters is gonna fuck them up but I suppose more room in the lower weight classes isn't bad for gamers since it lets indies and others who aren't the big boys shine, and lord knows thats been wild over the past year'ish.

Lath ,

Depending on who you ask, Deathloop was also a flop.

VaultBoyNewVegas ,

Not am Austin game though.

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

but Dishonored, Deathloop, and Prey all did pretty well I thought

I thought Arkane Austin (the closed one) was only Prey of those. Which is a shame, because Prey was utterly fantastic.

VaultBoyNewVegas ,

It is. Lots of "gamers" can't be fucked learning the difference between Austin and arkane, it's like how there's people who think bioware Montreal is the same as Edmonton or rockstar north is the same as san Diego when north makes GTA and the other red dead. Generally gamers don't care what studio does what just the first part of its name. Arkane Lyon are developing blade and that's still in progress.

Hildegarde ,

Arcane austin was already killed by the development of redfall. Most of the talent responsible for making dishonered and prey the games they were left during development of redfall. If arcane austin went back to making immersive sims instead of closing, it would be a new team making it, with little help from the pedegree implied by arcane's legacy.

Keep in mind however that arcane was two studios, the main studio in lyon france, and the other in austin texas. Dishonered was developed jointly. Dishonored 2 was lyon, pray was austin, and deathloop was lyon.

The lyon studio still exists. They are continuing to make games. The only thing announced from arcane is the marvel's blade game. Not optimistic, but arcane may still be around a while yet.

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