(gentle music) - [Falcon] So, Microsoft has
done something quite rash. Back in 2021, Microsoft
bought ZeniMax Media, which means they bought Bethesda, which means they bought a bunch of studios that Bethesda owns. And Microsoft decided
to close a bunch of 'em. Among those are Arkane Austin, the division of Arkane Studios
that was in charge of "Prey," Tango Gameworks, who brought
us the widely different titles, "Evil Within" and "Hi-Fi Rush," both wonderful games for
very different reasons. And they're also closing Alpha Dog Games, the makers of "Mighty
Doom," a mobile game, and Roundhouse Studios. So, what is this? Hi folks, it's Falcon,
and today on "Gameranx," we ask the question, what
the hell is going on at Xbox? So, from a business perspective, let's say you buy a bunch of things that make things that make money, and then you take a hammer
and you destroy those things. Are you a good businessman? (laughs) No, you're not. And that's what happened here. It's also what a lot
of big gaming companies have done in the past, EA in particular, and it's true that the gaming industry as well as most industries,
are feeling the burn, which by the way, wrong
tagline for the controller they announced hours after
closing all these studios. "Hey kids, it's me, Microsoft. I've closed a bunch of
your favorite studios, leaving you to feel burned and you should, you should feel the burn today!" When people got angry about that, they changed it pretty quick. But back to what I was saying, industry-wide things are not
going as good as they were when everybody was locked in
their house with nothing to do. Kind of not the biggest
shock in the world, and then we consider the
whole inflation problem and stuff going on in geopolitics. It's not shocking that it's
harder to make money right now. And while Xbox's cloud services have been making a lot of money for them, makes perfect sense, honestly, their hardware sales, which includes Surface,
it's not just Xbox, but all of their hardware
sales across the board are not doing good. Xbox is of course the premier brand regarding all of that is certainly
the most successful thing that they have come up
with in terms of hardware. And if that's not doing
great, there's problems. So that's the criteria we have going in. And then Arkane Austin, for instance, was tasked with making "Redfall," a live service game that
nobody at the studio wanted to make. Yes, there was a cool idea for a world, but no, these are people who, A, were not experienced
at live service games, and B, did not want to
make live service games. Both Arkane Lyon, the
original French studio, and Arkane Austin's expertise
is entirely in single player, immersive sim-based,
shooter/stealth games. And "Redfall" ain't that. We could go into the development
of "Redfall" all we wanted, but it's a game that suffered
a lot of serious issues during development,
particularly staffing issues. And again, people didn't
want to work on the game. People were hoping it would
be canceled by Microsoft or at least rebooted into an Arkane game. It wasn't, and there was
actually a 70% turnover. Seven out of every 10
developers that worked on "Prey" left during the course of this project. And you can tell that in every way this is not a game that should
have come from Arkane Austin for a vast array of reasons. And it is in no way shocking
that that game didn't do well. It's not a particularly good game. It's not the worst thing
I've ever played in my life, certainly, but it's not
good and it didn't do good. And the first instinct one
might have is to say, "Well, what if they just made "Redfall" good?" And that's not how it works. Again, this is a studio with expertise, literally the best guys at immersive sims. I would play an Arkane Austin
or Lyon immersive sim any day over basically any other immersive sim. The only one that really
has any chance is "Deus Ex," and the two more recent ones of that were far from complete games. Arkane has delivered on that
genre more than anybody else. And to move that studio
into making a type of game that frankly isn't doing well at all, regardless of who is making them... Like, the only one of these
that's really doing well is "Helldivers 2," and there's a lot of
reasons why it's doing well, despite the fact it's a live service game. Because live service games are just becoming more and more hated. "Redfall" didn't have a chance. It could have been twice
the game that it is and it wouldn't matter. So to me, that's a severe
management problem. It is unwise to delegate
people to work on something that they don't have any experience doing regardless of their
expertise in another area. So that's the problem I
think with Arkane Austin. Even still, "Redfall" wasn't
completely mandated by Xbox, this was apparently a project when Bethesda was just being Bethesda. So, it being forced on them
wasn't necessarily Microsoft, it was forced on them,
but Microsoft bought them, wouldn't they have the resources to, I don't know, help this project? You would think, right? According to Dinga Bakaba, a studio director at Arkane Lyon, their studio is currently safe, and they have a lot more of
the original dishonored devs on their team, which is good, but he says, this is just
terrible, it shouldn't happen. So I mean, we can kind
of at least understand where Microsoft is coming
from in closing Arkane Austin, but it starts to get a little murkier when we start talking
about Tango Gameworks. So, Tango Gameworks was responsible for "The Evil Within" one and two, the first of which held the record for highest selling first month of sales for a new survival horror
intellectual property for about a year before
"Dying Light" came out. And although "The Evil
Within 2" didn't do as well, it's a well-regarded game. And so is "Ghostwire: Tokyo," which I don't think was like a smash hit, but at one point they
had five million players. They tweeted out a thank you
to the five million players of "Ghostwire: Tokyo," which
implies pretty decent sales. The game they came up with after that was "Hi-Fi Rush," which I
did the "Before You Buy" on, great game, did pretty well,
had four million players, which isn't the five million players that "Ghostwire: Tokyo" had, but I'm also positive that "Hi-Fi Rush" was not as expensive to make. And while, yes, these player counts figure in a lot of Game Pass players, the point of Microsoft
buying these studios is for them to have Game Pass games that you can play for
free on the Xbox platform, thus incentivizing people
to go to the Xbox platform. And again, with those games, it worked. Those are not numbers to balk at. In my opinion, this throws
a fly in the ointment when we're talking
about the narrative that the problem is these studios aren't living up to expectations. No, "Redfall" absolutely did
not live up to expectations, but what did Tango Gameworks do? From what I can tell,
exactly what they were asked, and they performed as well
as one might expect them to. So, there's not really
a common denominator between these two companies in particular. And I don't think you can argue either of these companies are dead weight. Yeah, "Redfall's" a dud, but who cares? I know this is gonna sound like I'm going, "Ah, if I was in charge..." But if I was in charge, my response to "Redfall" would be, "Oh, maybe Arkane Austin should be working on immersive sims." Like, you don't take Old Yeller out back and shoot him in the head because he had a single
accident on the carpet. The phrase isn't, "If at
first you don't succeed, close the doors and put
everybody out on their ass." But it's not even about success. Like, clearly, "Hi-Fi Rush" did well. "Ghostwire: Tokyo" did well. Apparently, they just
didn't do well enough, which scares the hell out of me when I start thinking about other studios and IP's that Microsoft owns. These are people that are in charge that seem to switch direction quickly, don't seem to really care
about success or failure, but really just whatever whim they seem to be operating on currently. Those are the same people who say whether or not the
developers of "Hellblade" send you a sacrifice
in its upcoming sequel. If those people get to keep their jobs, those are the people who get to say, if the Machine Games people, the people who made the
fantastic "Wolfenstein" series get to keep their jobs. But how many "Star Fields"
are gonna have to come out before they start looking
at Todd Howard sideways? My guess would be quite a few because this standard is
clearly not being applied across the board. And then forget closures, think of the stuff that they can do without closing a game studio. They can meddle in the affairs
of any of these studios that they want. People complain about certain
choices being made in games and oftentimes those
choices aren't even made by the developers, they're made by the people who
own the development company. These are the same people
that are making those choices that are in charge of these moves. And I'm just gonna say that that's probably what
the real problem is here. Like, these are not consistent people. The day after killing Tango Gameworks, Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios, had a town hall amongst all
the employees that remained to talk about the future
goals of Xbox Game Studios as a whole and had the gall to say, we need smaller games that
give us prestige and awards. Aaron Greenberg, a VP
at Xbox Games marketing, on April 21st, said, "Hi-Fi Rush" was a breakout hit for us and our players in all key
measurements and expectations." Why are these people running the show? I'm not saying that absolutely everybody who said these things or the whole team thinks a certain way. It's probably not like that, there's probably people with
different opinions on here, but the result has been closing
studios that create games that they are willing
to call breakout hits. Can you imagine what that feels like for somebody who works at Tango? Just last month, an
executive said publicly that they consider that
game a breakout hit by all conceivable metrics, and this month they find out that everybody involved
is losing their job. What does that say to
every other developer that isn't Activision
Blizzard or Bethesda itself? And what does it say to consumers who spend money, invest their
time in these video games? And video games are, to be clear, a pretty big suck of both of those things on the consumer end. We buy that stuff with the assumption that there is somebody on the other end that's going to be consistent, and that companies that make these games and the sequels to these games and future games are going to be around. Because the whole reason
that we continue buying games is because we assume
they're gonna be good. Part of the reason we assume
they're going to be good is because we know that good
developers are making them. This is a move from Microsoft that inspires no confidence
anywhere across the board. And just to be clear,
that should be regarded as a harbinger of what is to come. When they are aggressively
cost cutting things that are doing well or they
know are capable of doing well, they are establishing precedent by which their teams of executives will go back and think about, "Well, we did it with these people, should we do it with these people? I mean, by the standards of success, these people are no more
successful than those people, why should we keep them around?" This is how we lost so many
of the double-A game studios of the 2000's. I mentioned EA and how they
sucked up a bunch of studios and closed them. And that's really what
happened with a lot of that. "Hi-Fi Rush" is one of
those types of games. A lot of what Arkane does is
one of those types of games. And now everybody on
that level is thinking, "Oh, well we have to make games that are going to be triple-A
hits on double-A budgets." That's good, that's gonna be easy for us. That's gonna result in a lot of good. No, I don't see this as a
sign of anything good to come. You guys know that I can
be old bird yells at cloud, but I've seen this kind
of stuff happen before and it happens in waves. Last year, we had a big wave
of this kind of crap happening with the whole Embracer situation. That's calmed down a bit. But now this is happening and this isn't gonna stop, especially if the mode of success in gaming is you build a studio and get bought by one
of the huge companies. Anybody who achieves
financial success with a game and your main goal is to
make games, do not sell. I'm just saying that right here. We, the gamers, would
absolutely appreciate that. And we will support you
when you put out good stuff. And also, we gotta support the developers coming out of this Xbox apocalypse because you know, a lot of
them will start new studios, and you know, a lot of those
studios will put out the games that those people actually
are excited to make, rather than something like "Redfall." It doesn't really matter whether we do or don't support Microsoft, but those guys, it does matter with, so we should keep our eyes peeled to that. At the same time, we
also gotta pour one out for everybody who doesn't make it back. There's gonna be people who
just get a job somewhere else and stop making games. And that sucks. That sucks. A lot of these people you know, when these Microsoft deals
were announced, thought, "Oh, nice, Microsoft has
all the money in the world, we're going to have better budgets and the ability to make better games." And this is how that went. It sucks. This whole situation sucks. I don't have anything positive
to leave you with either. Again, let's just keep our eyes peeled and try to support the developers that come out of this on the other end. That's the best I've got. How 'bout you? Leave us a comment, let
us know what you think. If you like this video, click like. If you're not subscribed,
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me on Twitter @FalconTheHero, and we'll see you next time
right here on "Gameranx."
