Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
Things haven’t been good in the world of video game creation for a minute; it’s never especially good, for instance, when Wikipedia has a whole separate article just to cover a specific slate of business closures in your industry. But even with that caveat, the stats on the site’s “2023-2034 video game industry layoffs” page are still pretty depressing: More than 10,000 people laid off at several major studios over the last two years, with dozens of other shops closing outright. This, in what’s generally been a banner couple of years, from a critical point of view; games are doing great, apparently, but the people making them, not so much.
That all came into laser focus on Tuesday, when Microsoft announced it was abruptly cutting four of its subsidiary studios: Roundhouse Studios (which is being folded into the team that still runs The Elder Scrolls Online); Alpha Dog Studios, creator of mobile game Mighty DOOM; Arkane Austin, responsible for 2017's Prey and the more recent, compromised-to-death Redfall; and Tango Gameworks, the Japanese studio that won a BAFTA last year for their colorful, highly energetic Hi-Fi Rush. Although an exact bodycount for the closures hasn’t been made clear, Microsoft did mention in a press release that the “changes are grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles,” which must have been a great relief to all the people losing their jobs amidst these equally high-impact cuts.
Sarcasm lobbed at industry figures who’ll never read this won’t move these ugly financial mountains, though, so we’ll do what we can do in this space: Briefly eulogize the output of a few of the studios hit by these recent closures, specifically Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, both of which were doing (or trying to do) great work in an industry very willing, it turns out, to punish even genuine, unquestionable success with abrupt unemployment.
The most high-profile of these wins, of course, was Hi-Fi Rush, which won over critics and fans alike last year with its fast-paced, colorful, rhythm-based approach to Devil May Cry-style combat. Original, energetic, and with the good grace not to try to milk 8,000 hours out of players, it’s the kind of game many gamers have been clamoring for of late, as pure a dose of a good idea as you’re likely to get in the modern landscape. Its gorgeously cartoonish animation won it the aforementioned BAFTA earlier this year; maybe even more importantly, it was a perfect sales pitch for Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service, proving that it was more than just a graveyard for old games (or a way to force people to play “high-impact blockbusters” like last year’s lackluster Starfield.)
It was also an obvious outgrowth of the studio’s previous work, which pushed hard to inject a sense of style, if never restraint, into modern gaming. Tango got its start with two extremely over-the-top horror titles, The Evil Within 1 and 2—capitalizing, at least in part, on the studio’s status as a project founded by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. If we’re being honest, though, we hold a special spot in our hearts for 2022's Ghostwire: Tokyo, an admittedly flawed attempt to merge supernatural investigation with a first-person shooter, which had some of our favorite open-world exploration gameplay of the last few years. (Also: Some genuinely freaky monster designs, pulled from Japanese folklore.) Like all of Tango’s games, it was an expression of a strong, independent sensibility that’s often lacking from modern big-budget game development, and a strong indication that the studio had nowhere to go but up—until the sudden, shocking end this week.
The same can’t be said of Arkane Austin, which was spun off from Dishonored creators Arkane Lyon several years back. And which, unfortunately, will likely now be remembered primarily for online vampire shooter Redfall, a game that sacrificed pretty much everything that makes Arkane’s games great—immersive environments, creative uses of powers, respect for player choices—in service of the live-service-style bullshit that infects so many big-budget games of this era. Buggy, meandering, and ill-thought-out, Redfall is not a fun time, to put it mildly, acting as both less than the sum of its parts, and the talents of the people making it.
None of which, we’d argue, is justification for pulling the plug on the entire studio. As writers like Jason Schreier (in his excellent Press Reset) have pointed out, many of the industry’s current issues come from a fundamental labor instability, practices that, among other problems, chuck out entire workforces the minute money isn’t directly flowing into a studio’s coffers. These demands create situations where studios have to pursue profit at all costs—by, say, making an online loot shooter of questionable quality—or else face immediate layoffs. Microsoft has made big claims about wanting to support the art of game development, but this week’s cuts make it clear that it’s still operating from this “cash now, or get cut” mindset. That’s an ethos that flies in the face of the basic fact that art requires failure as a matter of course. But if not even Microsoft can financially stomach that reality, where can big-budget gaming go from here?
The fact that all of this is happening to Arkane Austin, whose big pre-Redfall title was 2017's extraordinary Prey, only makes things feel more grim. Although occasionally dinged in some corners for some of its plotting and pacing issues, Prey was a masterpiece of atmosphere and tension when it arrived a few years back, creating the most terrifying and immersive sci-fi horror adventure since the legendary System Shock 2. (That’s to say nothing of the fascinating experiments it spawned, like its highly underrated, “What if our game was actually a roguelike?” expansion Mooncrash.) The point is that Arkane Austin made at least one genuinely great game, and had the continuing potential to make more, despite all; not anymore, though.
The unfortunate truth is that we have no great moral to end this on, beyond the very basic—or maybe just simplistic—concept that video games are good, and a perfect industry would make it easier for people to make them, not harder. We do know what we’ll be playing this weekend, though; catch us crashing our way through Vandelay Technologies while smacking down bots to the beat, or getting the crap scared out of us up on Talos I.