Xbox, do you even have a plan anymore?
09.05.2024 - 16:11
/ thesixthaxis.com
/ Matt Booty
/ Aaron Greenberg
/ Jill Braff
Ever since Microsoft started on their spending spree of acquisitions in 2018, gamers have feared the worst. Would Microsoft simply out-spend Sony to secure market dominance? Would PlayStation gamers be deprived of innumerable great games? Were they building Game Pass into a video gaming Death Star?
It turns out we should have feared the opposite. Death Stars do have a tendency to blow up, after all…
The past six months – pretty much ever since Microsoft closed the staggeringly huge acquisition of Activision Blizzard King – has seen almost every aspect of Xbox as a platform thrown into doubt. From first party games being console exclusives, to potentially quitting the hardware business, and now even the mere continued existence of their expensively acquired studios, there’s a complete lack of certainty to where the Xbox business is heading.
This week’s closure of Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, and Alpha Dog Studios, and Roundhouse Games’ integration elsewhere came as a massive shock. Arkane Austin’s Redfall was a flop, there’s no denying that, and the fact of the matter is that, even if a studio has been pushed down a particular path by management, no team is truly immune to failure. But Tango’s Hi-Fi Rush wasn’t a failure, far from it.
This time last year Hi-Fi Rush was held up as a shining example of what Xbox can do. Tango won’t have a chance to make a sequel.
Here was a game that potentially proved Microsoft’s plan from the end of the last generation. Hi-Fi Rush was a smaller production, a cheaper release and an eye-catching addition to the Xbox Game Pass library. It snagged 3 million players in just a few months, but it helps that it was a critical darling that ended up as a genuine Game of the Year contender, but it just did very well in general. “Hi-Fi Rush was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations,” Xbox marketing exec Aaron Greenberg tweeted a couple months after its release.
Reports suggest that the nail in the coffin for both studios was that, as they pitched new games – a Hi-Fi Rush sequel and a new immersive sim, potentially in the popular Dishonored universe – they requested more manpower. Instead of saying they should adjust and make do with what they’ve got, they decided less manpower was the answer. Xbox Game Studios’ head Matt Booty’s internal email said that closing both teams will “create capacity to increase investment in other parts of our portfolio and focus on our priority games.” Head of ZeniMax studios Jill Braff, meanwhile, suggested Bethesda had become too big to manage – “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,” she said. “I think we were about to topple