According to a new report from Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, the team at Tango Gameworks was pitching a sequel to their critically acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush which launched last and was recently ported to PlayStation.
Schreier spoke to several people behind the scenes and even seemed to have access to an audio recording of a townhall meeting where Xbox president Matt Booty praised Hi-Fi Rush but “did not specify why the company had shut down the development studio behind it, according to three people who were in attendance.”
Apparently Arkane Austin, another of the four studios shut down, was also in the process of pitching a new game that returned to their immersive sim roots, such as Dishonored 3. It was previously widely reported that the company hadn’t really wanted to develop the poorly received Redfall and that many of its staff had already left because of it.
According to the audio that Schreier heard, “Both Tango and Arkane released games last year and were looking to hire additional staff as they pitched new projects, which Booty and Braff suggested was the main factor behind their closures.”
In a somewhat idiotic statement, Jill Braff, head of ZeniMax studios, was heard to say that, “It’s hard to support nine studios all across the world with a lean central team with an ever-growing plate of things to do,” as a justification for closing Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games and the absorption of Roundhouse Studios into Zenimax Online.
Surely if supporting nine studios was going to be hard, then the answer would be to not buy them in the first place? It’s the kind of dumb corporate logic that led to Embracer gobbling up studios and then crashing hard when it couldn’t handle them all. As we know, that ended up with Embracer selling off or shutting down numerous studios, sacking a lot of people and ultimately announcing its split into three companies.
Microsoft purchased Zenimax as a method of feeding Game Pass, with part of the idea being that Game Pass would enable the production of smaller games as the emphasis would not have to be purely on selling millions of copies. Yet the shuttering of an excellent studio like Tango Gameworks has proven that wrong, and I can only imagine that various other studios under the Xbox umbrella are feeling pretty nervous right now.
