Hellblade 2
Xbox brought down mass industry condemnation yesterday when it announced it was closing four studios, among them Redfall’s Arkane Austin and most bafflingly, Hi-Fi Rush’s Tango Gameworks.
The two previous games from those studios are on total opposite ends of the spectrum, leading to a very uncomfortable realization: Microsoft can easily reward success how they reward failure, with mass layoffs and studio shutdowns. And do so even after high praise and assurances that everything was wonderful.
On one end of the spectrum is Redfall, a high-profile, poorly-reviewed bomb from Arkane Austin, one developed in the pre-Bethesda acquisition days, but carried over to Microsoft who did not intervene to improve it. You can argue that the studio that previously made Prey should be given a second chance, and I would, but in the wake of just how badly Redfall went, an unfortunate ending here is not that surprising, even if at one point a year ago, Microsoft did say they were not “currently” going to shut Arkane Austin down.
Hi-Fi Rush
Then there’s Tango Gameworks, the polar opposite. It made Hi-Fi Rush, the high-scoring, award-winning, stealth-dropped music platformer that is arguably the best exclusive that’s been released in the Xbox Series X/S generation. It would certainly make baseline sense that even after its recent CEO exit, that team should be nurtured and cultivated in order to make something else great, but instead Xbox’s only Japanese studio has been shutdown.
It's not just the decision to shut down a studio that made a game this good, it’s what Microsoft said about it at the time. Here’s Xbox’s Aaron Greenberg in April 2023:
“Hi-Fi Rush was a breakout hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations. We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release.”
It doesn’t get much more unequivocal than that, so the narrative that “well it was good but maybe it didn’t perform well” is apparently false. Unless, of course, Microsoft is just lying, and therein lies the problem.
It’s not a matter of assuming Microsoft is going to make more bad decisions from here, it’s that we can’t really trust what it says going forward. One thing that’s now infected players’ minds is the fate of Hellblade 2 from Ninja Theory. Like Hi-Fi Rush, that is not setup to be a blockbuster game in the traditional sense due to its smaller scale and the somewhat tighter reach of the first game. And with everything launching on Game Pass, there are no numbers to point to in order to say something is a “best-seller,” only Microsoft bragging about total players or hours played, far less useful metrics.
But in the wake of this, Microsoft could come out and say “Hellblade 2 and Ninja Theory have created something amazing that has surpassed our wildest expectations!” and I mean, why should anyone actually believe that, if this is what can happen to Tango Gameworks after Hi-Fi Rush? In the wake of these shutdowns Xbox’s Matt Booty has now said they are refocusing on their larger games, so who’s to say after Hellblade 2 Ninja Theory isn’t drawn and quartered with its remnants fed into Bethesda to make Elder Scrolls VI come out faster or something? We just don’t know.
It's hard to understate just how much Xbox has lost player trust as of late, recently with the decision to start opening up its exclusives to PlayStation, making them no longer exclusive, but at least you could make a case for that. Here, shutting down these studios and Tango specifically feels like a bridge too far for every fan and observer, and it has seriously damaged the credibility of Xbox leadership going forward. Current leadership, anyway.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
