Xbox Will Shut Down Redfall's Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush's Tango ...

Hi-Fi Rush

Just days after the one year anniversary of the release of Redfall, Microsoft has announced it will shut down Arkane Austin, its developer, along with Hi-Fi Rush/Ghostwire Tokyo dev Tango Gameworks and two other studios, Alpha Dog Studios and Roundhouse Games.

It’s a significant, brutal move in a year with already thousands of layoffs in the industry, and a sign that after all its acquisitions, Microsoft has begun to cull some of them.

This move comes in the wake of a June 2023 announcement where Xbox’s Matt Booty said there were “no plans” to close Arkane Austin in the wake of Redfall’s performance, but almost a year later, a reversal of that decision has now been made.

Redfall was a disastrous release from an otherwise well-regarded studio, an attempt at a live-ish co-op multiplayer game that arrived with extremely poor scores and an underwhelming userbase. In the past year the game received a somewhat significant patch to improve it, but it has not delivered additional content including two extra heroes that were sold at launch but never arrived, and they will not arrive, Arkane said, with players getting a “make good” refund offer instead.

Redfall

Meanwhile Tango Gameworks’ shutdown is even more mind-bending, given that the studio produced one of Xbox’s best hits this generation, Hi-Fi Rush, the small-scale music-based platformer that secured a number of nominations and awards, in addition to high scores. It’s unclear exactly what’s been going on at Tango, but in February 2023, CEO and founder Shinji Mikami left the company, which may have played into the overall shutdown of the studio now.

The other two smaller studios are Alpha Dog Studios, maker of the Wrathborne ARPG, and Roundhouse Games, a team formed in 2021 under Bethesda Game Studios. But with Roundhouse, Bloomberg reports it will be folded into Zenimax Online rather than fully shuttered.

There are reports that Arkane Austin lost 70% of its staff along the way during Redfall development, a game which was retooled multiple times, with some saying Microsoft probably should have made the decision not to release it at all after its acquisition. The idea was Arkane Austin could move on to other projects after this (and again, this is just Arkane Austin, not Arkane Lyon who is working on a Blade game), but apparently that just is not happening. Microsoft says some employees will make the jump to other Bethesda studios, but Austin itself is no more, and there will be layoffs.

The Tango shutdown is brutal, as unlike Redfall, Hi-Fi Rush was a huge hit and is arguably the best Xbox exclusive of this generation. Again, we’re still waiting on details of what exactly happened here, but it’s certainly a poor look.

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