Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks shut down by Microsoft

[BrainMuncher]

Why did I click on this? It's one of the worst written articles I've ever seen. It's full of fake quotes where it seems the author is larping in his head

"And no, when I say you might benefit, I don't mean like, with a raise or anything like that. Didn't you see the layoffs over there? [Gestures in such a way as to cover up the Net Income column on the latest financial report] These are lean times and you should be grateful you have a job at all. But you will absolutely benefit in that the project you're assigned to might receive the staffing and resources it needs to be something special, something that catches the industry's attention and earns critical acclaim. You know, something like Hi-Fi Rush!"

 

[Tyranicon]

Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty

It's childish but it made me laugh a bit.

 

[sser]

Matt Booty shows up in a presentation that awkwardly hit the skids in the Psychonauts 2 docu.

 

[lycanwarrior]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comm...=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I'm willing to die for a cause but I'm not gonna waste my life by going alone. It'll take a massive group to cause change, definitely not a couple of Redditors. You wanna help? Tell people about how fucked it all is and why it's all so fucked. Get people to open their eyes and see the dystopia we live in, show them who's responsible and eventually we should start to see more and more support for it and eventually hopefully something getting done.

 

[mediocrepoet]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comm...=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I'm willing to die for a cause but I'm not gonna waste my life by going alone. It'll take a massive group to cause change, definitely not a couple of Redditors. You wanna help? Tell people about how fucked it all is and why it's all so fucked. Get people to open their eyes and see the dystopia we live in, show them who's responsible and eventually we should start to see more and more support for it and eventually hopefully something getting done.

I'm willing to let some redditors die for a cause, I don't particularly care what it is, so I suggest they learn about the glories of Allah and how to make explosive vests.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

"I'm willing to die to crush the system, who's with me" - definitely-not-a-fed.

 

[mediocrepoet]

"I'm willing to die to crush the system, who's with me" - definitely-not-a-fed.

I don't know how someone sees a statement like that about video games and isn't like: You should go do that. Somewhere far away from me.

 

[Immortal]

New vid from Alanah Pearce of Santa Monica Studios:

"The quality of games is irrelevant"

This thought process from her and the game developers in general that she likely pow-wow's with at GDC - is likely while this will keep happening.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

Do you just not watch the video and comment anyway? Almost 5 seconds after she says that should concern gamers; i.e. the quality of the game does and should matter, but it doesn't, because your studio can get shuttered despite making great games. A minute after that she proves her point, because companies like Warner Bros will keep focusing on live service despite Suicide Squad disastrously bombing, and Hogwarts Legacy being the best selling game of the year.
All these suits see is risk and potential gain. A flop is a flop with a live service or single player AAA, but the potential gain is exponentially higher with the former.

 

[dbx]

I still have less sympathy for devs than suits.
Ultimately the only thing corpo suits want is to make money. Even ESG/DEI is peddled by suits only as a means to make money on the stonks side (we should always remember that DEI/ESG is a socialis government creation to inject politics into capitalism by forcing institutional investment orgs to factor in DEI/ESG stuff when deciding where to put their money and other people pension funds)

Devs however are more than happy to inject avery single retarded political bullshit in their work for free to be the good goys in the eyes of their pseudo friends in their metrosexual bubble.

 

[Morgoth]

Corpo suits no longer "just want money", they're in a drowning frenzy that pulls everyone under water.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Do you just not watch the video and comment anyway? Almost 5 seconds after she says that should concern gamers; i.e. the quality of the game does and should matter, but it doesn't, because your studio can get shuttered despite making great games.

Bullshit, if Redfall was a hit and Starfield met the expectation to be blockbuster on the level of Skyrim, none of this would be happening. You cannot constantly produce massive turds and then expect to carry along as normal because some tiny indie doodoo like HIFI Rush was moderately popular.

 

[Lutte]

Do you just not watch the video and comment anyway? Almost 5 seconds after she says that should concern gamers; i.e. the quality of the game does and should matter, but it doesn't, because your studio can get shuttered despite making great games.

Bullshit, if Redfall was a hit and Starfield met the expectation to be blockbuster on the level of Skyrim, none of this would be happening. You cannot constantly produce massive turds and then expect to carry along as normal because some tiny indie doodoo like HIFI Rush was moderately popular.

Redfall was a game none of its developers wanted to make.
https://www.pcgamer.com/report-most...-that-stayed-hoped-microsoft-would-cancel-it/
> Report: Most of Arkane Austin's Prey veterans quit during Redfall's development, and the ones that stayed hoped Microsoft would cancel it

They were told to make a game in a genre they had no experience in and never wanted to touch. Something that must be said in this thread about Arkane Austin shutting down: the studio was already a shell of itself, 70% of the staff left before the shut down happened.

>Around 70% of team members who had worked on Arkane's (excellent) Prey had departed the studio by the time Redfall was ready for store shelves

 

[soutaiseiriron]

Do you just not watch the video and comment anyway? Almost 5 seconds after she says that should concern gamers; i.e. the quality of the game does and should matter, but it doesn't, because your studio can get shuttered despite making great games.

Bullshit, if Redfall was a hit and Starfield met the expectation to be blockbuster on the level of Skyrim, none of this would be happening. You cannot constantly produce massive turds and then expect to carry along as normal because some tiny indie doodoo like HIFI Rush was moderately popular.

That's exactly what the video described though.
Redfall was shit because Zenimax demanded a live service. Flop, studio shuttered despite making good games like Dishonored or Prey previously.
Starfield was successful, but it wasn't Skyrim tier successful. So the rest of Zenimax gets cuts.
Hi-Fi Rush was highly unlikely to not be successful, it was a 9/10 with over 20k reviews on Steam which is impressive for a game that came out on Game Pass with zero marketing except a trailer the day of release.

So one great game, one mid game, one bad game (because of publisher meddling) yet the studio that made the great game gets shut down. In other words, "the quality of the game is irrelevant". Anyone can get shut down.

Unlikely any of this HAD to happen anyway. Most probably Zenimax still turned a profit the last two quarters, Xbox probably too.

 

[Lutte]

Xbox probably too

Lol no.
Here's Microsoft's recent spendings to prop Xbox:
>Microsoft spent $7.5 billion to buy ZeniMax Media, which owns Bethesda, in March 2021.
>Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard, a developer which makes those games as well as World of Warcraft and Diablo, for an eye-watering $69 billion in a deal that went through in October 2023.

Just those two acquisitions in themselves total to 76.5 billion dollars. I don't have the numbers for all acquisitions but they went the past few years on a massive buying spree of various studios big and small.

They're going to need more than just games that are profitable to get a return on that level of investment. They want more than games that pay just a little more than the cost they spent on making the games. Xbox needs to earn much more to justify its continued existence as a black hole towards the rest of Microsoft. Even if HiFi Rush is profitable, so what? Microsoft has bled money for the xbox division and now the xbox division has to show returns and not just small returns.
Btw current gen xbox series S and X are still selling like crap.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Dishonored was made by the Arkane Lyon, most of Arkane's catalogue was. Austin branch hasn't really done dick aside from Prey, succesful studio my ass.

Starfield is so succesful that a year after release they have active playerbase on the level of Choplifter HD.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

Dishonored was made by the Arkane Lyon, most of Arkane's catalogue was. Austin branch hasn't really done dick aside from Prey, succesful studio my ass.

repost from last page

as for starfield
a. most players probably play(ed) it on game pass and probably 25ish % total players are on consoles, not steam.
b. starfield already made its money. it's not a live service and MS knew they were kneecapping profits by putting it on game pass. a game can have 1 million players today and have zero tomorrow but still make all the money there was to make from those 1 million players.
as i said, successful (i.e it made a profit) but not skyrim tier.
bethesda is never getting shut down or cut even if their growth falls off a cliff because of the dream of them making another skyrim

 

[abija]

How do you know starfield made its money? Credits are miles long and development took forever.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

i don't, i'm guessing, but the numbers i know can and imo do absolutely make sense.
it was the #11 best selling game in the US according to some market research firm. it had close to 4000 people listed as professional credits on mobygames. for reference, final fantasy 16 was the #16th best selling game, was likely in a similar development timeline, released on PS5 only and had a similar number of staff, and may have cost similar or more to develop since (afaik) a lot of the staff for starfield was outsourced to india.

it also had 330k peak players on steam despite releasing on gamepass day one, which is a lot.

 

[markec]

Dishonored was made by the Arkane Lyon, most of Arkane's catalogue was. Austin branch hasn't really done dick aside from Prey, succesful studio my ass.

repost from last page

as for starfield
a. most players probably play(ed) it on game pass and probably 25ish % total players are on consoles, not steam.
b. starfield already made its money. it's not a live service and MS knew they were kneecapping profits by putting it on game pass. a game can have 1 million players today and have zero tomorrow but still make all the money there was to make from those 1 million players.
as i said, successful (i.e it made a profit) but not skyrim tier.
bethesda is never getting shut down or cut even if their growth falls off a cliff because of the dream of them making another skyrim

In the mind of the top brass making a profit is not the same as being a successful game. The success is measured by reaching or surpassing projected profits. Not saying that Starfield didnt reach those goals but just saying that despite its sales it might still be considered an underwhelming or disappointed launch by the people in charge. Usually when people are happy with the sales numbers and profits it would be bragged about in media for months.

Also the player numbers are important since the company plans making expansions, dlc and earn from mods on creation club. Having your playerbase ditching the game in a short notice does not bode well for future monetization efforts.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

i'm entirely aware of how capitalism and growth works with public companies. as i said "bethesda is never getting shut down or cut even if their growth falls off a cliff".
being successful (i.e. making a small-moderate profit) and not meeting expectations is not contradictory and i never said that it did meet MS' expectations of skyrim-tier success. it didn't. it's just that i find it exceedingly unlikely that it didn't make a profit at all.

fair enough wrt DLC and creation club. i forgot creation club existed since i think only a small number of consoletards ever buy anything off it. dlc is fair, but i don't think it has been a part of the core of bethesda's money making after ESO and fallout 76, i think it's essentially a small relic of old bethesda and zenimax, these days it functions as fanservice and a small handful of pocket change while they gear up for the next title.

 

[markec]

i'm entirely aware of how capitalism and growth works with public companies. as i said "bethesda is never getting shut down or cut even if their growth falls off a cliff".
being successful (i.e. making a small-moderate profit) and not meeting expectations is not contradictory and i never said that it did meet MS' expectations of skyrim-tier success. it didn't. it's just that i find it exceedingly unlikely that it didn't make a profit at all.

As said the game probably made a profit, the question is does the profit falls within the lines that would higher ups consider it a success or disappointment.

But even if its fell low of expected sales I still don't believe they would shut down the studio.

What I believe could happen is that Microsoft puts their people in charge all of the key positions in Bethesda to keep the studio on short leash. Also to purge people who they don't see as contributing enough and maybe even shuffle some employees from different studios.

Plus they will probably greenlit a live service game in Bethesda franchise and outsource spinoffs to other studios.

fair enough wrt DLC and creation club. i forgot creation club existed since i think only a small number of consoletards ever buy anything off it. dlc is fair, but i don't think it has been a part of the core of bethesda's money making after ESO and fallout 76, i think it's essentially a small relic of old bethesda and zenimax, these days it functions as fanservice and a small handful of pocket change while they gear up for the next title.

I think that lessons learned with ESO and F76 is that live service and micro transactions can be very profitable. And I would not be surprised that they plan to implement those elements gradually into their single player games.

 

[Itoh]

Given that Starfield had a budget somewhere between 200 and 400 million, it would have had to've sold a minimum of what, five or six million copies to have turned a profit? I very much doubt it did anywhere near those numbers, and unlike most RPGs it won't have a 'long tail' of slow & steady sales years after release, given its terrible reputation(In theory Bethesda could pull a CDPR and spend years fixing it up, but I wouldn't hold my breath). Unless we get a definitive official statement to the contrary, it seems quite reasonable to consider Starfield a massive flop.

 

[BrainMuncher]

Fallout 3 required steam when it was released. The non-GOTY edition has about 20k reviews, probably a reasonable indication of first-year sales. Starfield has about 150k reviews. Seems strange that the former would be considered a success and the latter a failure. They must have wasted massive amounts of money during development.

Unless gamepass people can leave steam reviews? I've never used gamepass.

edit: fallout 4 has 360k reviews after 8 years of deep discounts

 

[soutaiseiriron]

it would have had to've sold a minimum of what, five or six million copies to have turned a profit?

ff16 which i mentioned before did 3 million copies during launch week according to square, so i don't see why starfield couldn't have done 5 million.