[wlesieutre]

IIRC previous Arkane Austin titles are Dishonored 2 and Prey which were great games, but Redfall was definitely not so well received. I wouldn’t necessarily agree they were closed for “pretty much no reason,” but should one big flop mean a studio gets the axe?

With how expensive AAA development has gotten maybe that’s the stakes now, and a reason so many are taking the modern Hollywood playbook of churning out sequels and remasters.

The really egregious “no reason” closure was Tango Gameworks, makers of Hi-Fi Rush.

[swaginator]

> With how expensive AAA development has gotten maybe that’s the stakes now, and a reason so many are taking the modern Hollywood playbook of churning out sequels and remasters.

The studio was owned by M$ though. There's no reason they couldn't have kept all those people in-house and just moved them on to some game with a tried and true IP attached to it.

[ecshafer]

Is there "no reason"?

I want to steelman microsoft's position here, and I can find many reasons:

1. The financial loss of the product (Redfall) was large enough that keeping that business unit itself was a risk. They need to show wallstreet that something is being done.

2. While there are talented people at the studio, they are unable as a corporation to be able to figure out what went wrong, ie who do they need to fire and who can they keep.

3. Their current business model precludes just moving people to other products for some reason, they don't want to disrupt those other products with a reorganization, this just isn't how they run studios, they want the teams to be colocated, etc.

While sure its bad that the studio lost its job I really don't think it's no reason.

[swaginator]

Maybe "no reason" was a bad word choice. I would say that regardless of the reason, it doesn't matter to workers. What matters to workers is to have as much power as possible over their own situation. The simple calculus is that if you see another studio closing, for any reason, you recognize that this will be used as a cudgel by management and executives to work you and your colleagues even harder. When the true nature of the relationship between employee and worker is revealed, unionization is the obvious response.

[lesuorac]

I'm honestly surprised at how well 1. works. Like if you told me as a company you spent over a million dollars hiring a ton of people and can't figure out what to do with them that you're just going to fire them I'd see that as a failing of management.

Even worse if you give them severance for like 6+ months of wages. Like you couldn't figure out how to reassign them with that long of a timespan?

[ChoGGi]

2. From what I understand most of the talented people left during redfall's development.