Board 8 > Microsoft shuts down several studios, including Tango and Arkane Austin.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Real fucking hold my beer moment here, couldn't just let some of that Sony animosity ride, huh?

https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/1787836099429011460

Tango getting shut down right after Hi-Fi Rush is so fucked

this is maybe the most upset Ive been about any of layoff news

I haven't played all of Hi-Fi Rush yet since the PS5 version is buggy for me, but what I did play was extremely cool, and was the first Microsoft exclusive game (at the time) that I cared about at all since Halo Reach.

So yeah of course that means it's killed.

Tango in particular is huge after Hi-Fi Rush, thats horrible. Thoughts with all those affected.

Oh, and in addition theyre cancelling the remaining Redfall DLC and ending support of that. Sounds like it was actually getting into a good state too.

All of this is happening so they can prioritise the biggest titles more which is a story we keep seeing. Industrys in an absolutely dire state. Though I struggle to remember the last studio closure this shocking since THQ went bust a decade ago. Lionhead maybe, guess what that has in common with this, Microsoft ownership.

Yeah you gotta make sure all that money goes to Bethesda proper, so they can put more work into the game that was so underwhelming that the big modders stopped working on it because it was too boring to bother.

For all of MSs talk about really wanting a foothold in Japan, they finally had a studio there making quality games and they fucking shut it down

god I wish so bad that Gerstmann interviewing Phil Spencer live on stream was still a thing that happened in the summer, hed fucking eviscerate him

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/9/94b614f3.jpg

I say this without exaggeration, I think Xbox as a brand is meaningless. They are the industry joke. The only good thing they have to their name is a service that lets you borrow games as much as you want for cheap.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

For all of MSs talk about really wanting a foothold in Japan, they finally had a studio there making quality games and they fucking shut it down

god I wish so bad that Gerstmann interviewing Phil Spencer live on stream was still a thing that happened in the summer, hed fucking eviscerate him

Giant Bomb still do it but with Jeff Grubb doing the interviewing. I doubt Grubb will give him an easy ride.

literally what the fuck

WazzupGenius00 posted...

For all of MSs talk about really wanting a foothold in Japan, they finally had a studio there making quality games and they fucking shut it down

god I wish so bad that Gerstmann interviewing Phil Spencer live on stream was still a thing that happened in the summer, hed fucking eviscerate him

Didn't Grubb interview him on a GB livestream last year? Or did I imagine that?

I don't understand why they didn't try to market Hi-Fi Rush instead of shadow dropping it onto Game Pass.

Of course it underperformed, they didn't put any effort into making it a success.

skullbone posted...

I don't understand why they didn't try to market Hi-Fi Rush instead of shadow dropping it onto Game Pass.

Of course it underperformed, they didn't put any effort into making it a success.

I think it was more Ghostwire that was the game that struggled

a shame because the game is actually pretty cool in concept

skullbone posted...

I don't understand why they didn't try to market Hi-Fi Rush instead of shadow dropping it onto Game Pass.

Of course it underperformed, they didn't put any effort into making it a success.

The game didn't underperform at all apparently, both Microsoft and Tango said the game was a big success by all metrics.

It just didn't matter to them anymore.

Microsoft literally would have lost money this year if not for the Activision acquisition based on the earnings call from a week or 2 ago, in the red. They are about to become a a Call of Duty and Forza machine, and let the existing Blizzard games ride until they die. Gears of War and Halo have both plumeted as brands. Starfield did fine but failed to establish interest as a new pillar and ABSOLUTELY did not set the world on fire like Microsoft was banking on. Elders Scrolls is probably half a decade away still.

They are unironically banking on....a Perfect Dark reboot. I expect that to end up cancelled.

I guess the PlayStation release of Hi-Fi Rush didn't do as well

Impossible to understand these decisions without internal data. Most likely those studios were especially expensive and moving the devs to other projects was easier than hiring a bunch of new even more expensive devs. People forget that when a company is bought by a megacorp, the "cell wall" is pretty much instantly dissolved. It is now ripe for redigestion at any point.

Even if Redfall was a massive success, they still could've closed the studio, and left just a skeleton crew to maintain it and occasionally do DLC updates. That happens to a bunch of live service games.

I think people would have vastly preferred that though!

The sad thing is, Xbox isnt an industry joke, theyre a big player and this is just showing where the industry is. Its bigger and more shocking for sure but sadly I think we can expect a lot more of this. Gaming is in a super unhealthy place right now in general.

LightningStrikes posted...

Giant Bomb still do it but with Jeff Grubb doing the interviewing. I doubt Grubb will give him an easy ride.

Seanchan posted...

Didn't Grubb interview him on a GB livestream last year? Or did I imagine that?

Im sure hell give him a hard time, but hes not Jeff Gerstmann.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Yeah you gotta make sure all that money goes to Bethesda proper, so they can put more work into the game that was so underwhelming that the big modders stopped working on it because it was too boring to bother.

I'm pretty sure Bethesda just got more layoffs in the midst of all this. I'll see if I can find that again.

As part of that announcement itself:

With this consolidation of our Bethesda studio teams, so that we can invest more deeply in our portfolio of games and new IP, a small number of roles across select Bethesda publishing and corporate teams will also be eliminated.

I don't know how big a deal that is compared to the rest.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/a-fing-gut-stab-arkane-boss-criticises-microsoft-execs-for-studio-closures/?s=09

This is the most poorly timed product release of all time.

https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/1787859509081489421?t=HOdExoAz-VDWk19vjos_gg&s=19

https://twitter.com/PatStaresAt/status/1787870260789740024

i mean closing the Redfall studio is a surprise only in that it wasn't already closed after releasing Redfall in the first place.

Hi-Fi Rush though, that's a surprise. feels like something backstage happened there as there's no obvious reason to release a studio fresh off an extremely loved game release.

Meanwhile Hi-Fi Rush was just announced to be part of this month's Humble Choice.

I thought Tango was mostly a husk at this point? Closing the studio doesn't mean people are fired, they likely put them into their other studios.

GranzonEx posted...

I thought Tango was mostly a husk at this point? Closing the studio doesn't mean people are fired, they likely put them into their other studios.

Why would they be mostly a husk?

And what other studios would the Tango folks go to? They're MS's only Japanese studio.

https://twitter.com/JuiceHead33/status/1787860542398300383?t=hGLAfd1_18HGwC4FgCHJPg&s=19

My jaw dropped when I saw this news, it's so fucked

MacArrowny posted...

Why would they be mostly a husk?

And what other studios would the Tango folks go to? They're MS's only Japanese studio.

Didn't Mikami leave last year? Might have checked out way before that because Ghostwire is nothing like what he would direct.

Mikami only directed the first Evil Within, but yeah he left a while ago.

Tango was hardly a "husk" just because Mikami left. Going purely by his credits, he had very little creative involvement in any of the studio's output beyond their first game. It's important to remember that games are made by a ton of ridiculously talented people whose names most people never learn or even see. Tango was probably at the actual height of their game and poised to jump into even more prestige after Hi-Fi Rush, which is what makes this shuttering so tragic.

I'm pretty sure a bunch of important/talented people left Tango in recent years, not just Mikami. All of these studios are under ZeniMax, which has been a problematic company for a long time.

Ikumi Nakamura, the Ghostwire Tokyo art director, left a few years ago and started Unseen to work on the game Kemuri a few years ago too. Not sure if others joined her.

https://twitter.com/PoorlyAgedStuff/status/1787854986967232914

I'm so goddamn upset.

https://media1.tenor.com/m/QdaZqNfbaZgAAAAd/mario-party.gif

This gif is over a decade old and still relevant.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/0/0b460dbe.png

Ive been raging about this in my group chats all day. What an absolute disgrace, what the fuck is going on at Xbox?

Ninja Theory will not last 6 months after releasing Hellblade 2. I can't even imagine how much money they've lost in that game after so many years of development.

https://twitter.com/Zari_Wari/status/1787857935126737194

Dinga Bakaba, studio director of Arkane Lyon:

"This is absolutely terrible. Permission to be human: to any executive reading this, friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you.

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.

https://twitter.com/DBakaba/status/1787839169588265251

KamikazePotato posted...

https://media1.tenor.com/m/QdaZqNfbaZgAAAAd/mario-party.gif

This gif is over a decade old and still relevant.

Why does the Nintendo ball have a Ubisoft logo?

I don't know man, ask whoever made that gif years ago

Ubisoft at the time of that GIFs creation was EXTREMELY hooked in with Nintendo.

KamikazePotato posted...

"This is absolutely terrible. Permission to be human: to any executive reading this, friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you.

This is great sentiment but the reality is that an executive's job is to extract value from something while destroying it in the process. So instead of trying to find an exec who actually cares (lol), why not figure out how to make games without involving corporate executives at all

https://twitter.com/zoigoms/status/1787866484422906335

https://twitter.com/jessevitelli/status/1787853367034740758

https://twitter.com/Exceed_UH2022/status/1787953634308723079