Success Can’t Save Your Favorite Game Studios Anymore

This week, Microsoft and Bethesda announced that they would be closing down multiple game development studios under their umbrella. These include Alpha Dog Games, maker of Mighty Doom, and Arkane Austin, developer of the disastrous Redfall among others. In the gaming industry, the conventional wisdom has long been held that bad games sink you and great games save you, which would lead many to drawing an unfortunate line between Redfall’s reception and Arkane Austin’s closure — but immediately stops supporting that conclusion when you get to Tango Gameworks.

Founded in 2010 by Shinji Mikami, the studio was largely known for horror games like Evil Within until last year. As part of a shadow drop release, the cool rhythmic action title Hi-Fi Rush garnered critical acclaim from all sides, multiple awards and nominations, and was recently ported to PlayStation 5. Xbox Vice President Aaron Greenberg even said that the game was a “break out hit” in “all key measurements and expectations.” Moreover, they did what critics and fans alike beg studios to do: make something wildly different outside of their comfort zones.

Hi-Fi RUSH was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations. We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release.

— Aaron Greenberg 🙅🏼‍♂️💚U (@aarongreenberg) April 21, 2023

Despite all that, late at night in Tokyo, the people who made a Game of the Year candidate were informed through an email by Xbox Games Studios head Matt Booty that they were closing the studio.

Hi-Fi Rush was, by Microsoft’s own admission, exactly the kind of game the Redmond giant has been convincing their audience to stick with Game Pass for, which sets unclear goals and expectations from the get-go. What exactly constitutes a success on Game Pass? Hi-Fi Rush topped a whopping 3 million players last year, but that clearly was not enough for the higher ups. The lack of transparency with the general consumer on how games are evaluated internally is understandable, but it seems that not even Tango was aware of what metrics their game seemingly missed.

Despite having worked at a Japanese game studio myself, it does not take much experience to understand that creative jobs perform better when there is greater incentive beyond decidedly-unclear goals at the end. No one is working on a video game in hopes that they can get to the finish line of release so that they can continue to bite their nails over whether a nearly-90 metacritic game will result in a studio closure down the line as corporate, as Booty puts in the email, “look[s] across the business to identify the opportunities that are best positioned for success.”

Which leaves us grasping within this self-imposed murkiness for an answer to an important question: If success cannot save your studio, what can?

This is a problem that is likely on the mind of every other Xbox studio that does not produce games commanding audiences of tens of millions. With the upcoming release of Hellblade II: Senua’s Sacrifice, it is not difficult to imagine that a successful launch would not shield Ninja Theory from Microsoft’s ever-floating evaluations. Now those talented developers who have spent years toiling away on their game across multiple changes in their parent company’s focus have an ominous pall hanging over their head. It is not just enough to make a good game, nor make a game that critics and audiences both like, but you have to hope that a C-Suite executive’s nebulous plans forward include taking your studio along for the ride.

We have long assumed that corporate ownership by one of the richest companies in the industry would inoculate studios from tragic closures, but we were wrong. We thought that putting out a game with a modest budget would be protection, but we were wrong there too. And now we have learned that putting out a critically acclaimed title that said richest companies openly brag about succeeding will not protect anyone. There truly is no more shelter to hide under in the gaming industry and developers and consumers both suffer from it.

When studios are concerned for their very existence, games like Hi-Fi Rush do not have space to make it to market. Tango Gameworks bet on themselves by making something different than what they are known for and, by every metric available to them, that bet demonstrably paid off. In a situation where their head was on the chopping block the entire time, waiting for the executioner to make the call on whether their axe comes down on the back of Tango’s neck, you could not get a Hi-Fi Rush.

It is also unclear at this point what players can do to support games they love anymore. When the act of championing a game you like can only be measured in numbers too absurd for most video games, then there is no reasonable way to patronize them anymore. If three million players are not enough, why should anyone expect that four or five or ten million would be? It is no longer satisfactory to executives for a game to be a decent success, so there is little reason for audiences to become publicly enamored with what they play. In one fell swoop, Microsoft managed to undermine any grassroots marketing efforts they could have counted on for games that are not Call of Duty.

The games industry is ill and things like this, like the closure of Tango Gameworks and high-quality studios like Roll7, are symptoms. They can be written off by people as not their kind of game or reasoned with twisted return-on-investment maximization brainworms, but they do not represent an industry that is happy and healthy. The industry is now trying to redefine what success means until it skyrockets into an utterly unattainable goal post. It is likely not by intention, the decision-makers are also flying by the seat of their pants on this high-speed rocket, but ultimately that doesn’t actually mean anything. Microsoft was supposed to be the company that stepped back and said “Not past this line.” Now they’re erasing the line in the sand and hoping we don’t notice.