It’s a ghost story, one whispered in the digital halls where the footsteps of gamers have scattered in the din of multiplayer fray, but which snakes its way through the rubble of an unfulfilled single-player dream. In a recent report into Microsoft’s decision to shutter multiple Bethesda Softworks studios – including the legendary Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games – the Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier has shredded the carpet of secrecy that keeps gaming companies’ rationale out of the public eye. For fans of Arkane Austin, questions and what-ifs have, of course, flared up over the future for the studio’s masterful Dishonored series.
Arkane Austin, the studio responsible for creating immersive worlds for Dishonored, Prey and 2023’s supernatural shooter Redfall, hoped to return to its roots with a new ‘immersive sim’ single-player project – a pitch, we have since heard from our trusted sources, that was for all intents and purposes a next instalment in the Dishonored series. Wherever this idea might now go, it certainly seems it is now under the newly expanded Arkane banner, somewhere, perhaps even the Lyon studio.
Meanwhile, Tango Gameworks, the studio behind Hi-Fi Rush, an excellent rhythm-action game, had pitched a sequel shortly before being also shut down. And so the question lingers: why would Microsoft white label these award-winning projects from a frankly talented team?
The closures, too, were only part of a strategy being pursued in other ways. ‘Over the past couple months, we’ve had the difficult task of making decisions surrounding development resources and how we’re allocating them, taking a close look at the studios around the world and the exceptional games that they are working on, including our talented teams here at ZeniMax,’ wrote the head of Xbox Game Studios Matty Booty and the head of ZeniMax studios Jill Braff in a town-hall meeting with ZeniMax staff the day after two ZeniMax Studios groups were shuttered. Booty praised Hi-Fi Rush, ostensibly, took pains to state that Arkane Austin’s studio closure ‘has absolutely no correlation to the recent launch of Redfall’, and seemed to cast blame on Microsoft’s ‘expansive studio system’ in recent times that could have been ‘spread too thin’. Booty’s colourful choice of analogy appeared to hint that all of this amounted to a strategic rebalancing of Microsoft’s own games division that sought to concentrate resources more efficiently, like ‘peanut butter on bread’.
Microsoft, one of the biggest tech and gaming companies of the modern age, has refined its approach to keep pace with the changing landscape of games, trends and consumer demands. As it continues to lead in the gaming ecosystem with an ever-expanding roster of gaming studios and an expansive vision for the future of Xbox, it is focused on delivering the best experiences in gaming by streamlining its studio operations and continuing to foster world-class creativity and innovation.
Apart from helping players get closure on games they’ve sunk hundreds of hours into, Microsoft’s larger commitment to refining its gaming division and exploring the future of interactive entertainment is apparent. The public awaits imminent events like the Xbox Game Showcase and ‘Redacted Direct’, whatever that is, eager to see what unexpected surprises Microsoft has in store for gamers in 2022.
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Even in the wake of the closures and the evolving narrative around what the gaming push means for Microsoft in the future, one thing is clear: the company remains committed to pushing the frontiers of what gaming technology can offer and following whatever path it takes to develop excellence and interesting innovative content for the gaming generation.
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