After good news, there always comes bad. At least that's what seems to be happening in the world of video games. For two years, studio closures have been coming one after another and unfortunately they are all similar. But there can't be anything worse than Microsoft's management of Xbox studios (except perhaps that of Embracer Group). The firm announced today that it is closing the doors of 4 Bethesda studios, some of which are simply iconic.
1900 and counting
This comes just a few months after the layoff of 1900 people across the group following the acquisition of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard. And if we thought that the big clean-up was over, it is clearly not the case. IGN, which relays the information, shares an email sent to Xbox Game Studios employees by Matt Booty. It is written that the 4 studios concerned by the closures (and therefore the layoffs) are Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Studios, Roundhouse Games.
Some of them are better known for having developed Hi-Fi Rush, Redfall, The Evil Within or even Ghostwire Tokyo. However, not all developers are lost. Indeed, we can read that the Roundhouse Games teams will migrate to ZeniMax Online Studios as support. Other people and projects, however, have not had the same luck of being picked up.
This is particularly the case for the teams at Arkane Austin, the subsidiary that brought Redfall to life. In view of its commercial failure, Microsoft has decided to completely stop its development. The only good news in this story is that the impacted online games will not be shutting down and players will be able to continue to enjoy them for a while. But how much weight does this carry when we learn that dozens of employees have been unexpectedly laid off?
https://twitter.com/ArkaneStudios/status/1787837804287860886
Investing in the future… by cutting jobs
Microsoft’s stated reason is to redirect financial resources to focus on “high-impact titles” and “Bethesda’s portfolio of high-impact games.” successes and beloved worlds that you have nurtured for several decades.” Although it thanks the teams for each of their recent projects, the email seems rather impersonal to us. This has obviously provoked the anger of the players... but not only.
Dinga Bakaba, known for having directed the Dishonored and Deathloop franchises within the Arkane Lyon studio, dared to express himself on his social networks for a moment that he describes as “human”. In reality, it is a tirade denouncing the way developers have been treated for several years. He states:
It is worth noting that this studio, based in Lyon, France, is not impacted by the measure, which only concerns Arkane's Texas studio. For the moment, no one knows what will happen to the laid-off employees, or if they will find work again.
https://twitter.com/DBakaba/status/1787839169588265251
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