Ok, so…big news day. Kinda crazy news day, to be honest. From the Nintendo President tweeting about a Switch 2(for real this time!)to Remedy announcing that they’re canning a live service MP game, to this HUGE news about Xbox/Bethesda shutting down 4 more studios, at least two of which were studios with a good track record of great games…it’s just been quite the roller coaster of a day for the gaming industry.

Now, just to be upfront, I have to come out and say that I personally don’t share the sense of outrage so many online seem to right now. I do share the confusion about all the studio closures. But I also want to take a step back from it and see if I can’t tease out a little bit of what I think is really going on.

The other day, I was reading this article where Todd Howard was saying he wants Bethesda to release more games, more often. And while I would love to see Elder Scrolls 6 or Fallout 5 prior to 2028, I’m not really holding my breath on that. Bethesda will have to put up or shut up on that score.

Now…I know what you’re thinking: obviously, they’re shutting up, right?

I don’t really know about that.

In the article linked above about Remedy canning the live service project Kestrel, the CEO was talking about how the whole thing would allow them to shift resources and people to existing franchises. Then this thing with Bethesda closing down several studios…it sounds to me like the same sort of thing; consolidation and reallocation of resources and manpower.

AAA gaming is in something of a crazy state nowadays, with big games costing as much as or more than average Hollywood films, the revenue that companies have to make back on these things is astronomical by comparison to game dev budgets from the early 2000s. So streamlining is going to happen, especially with all the crazy paradigm shifts that happened because of COVID. There are kinks to that entire situation that are still not worked out and some don’t seem like they will ever be worked out, and we find what we used to think of as “normal” ever again.

All that being said, let’s look at these studios that got closed down for a moment. Let’s start with the one that really upset everyone; Tango Gameworks. Tango Gameworks was put on the map and made famous by the work of legendary developer Shinji Mikami, who wanted to leave the studio long before he actually left last year, right after the crazy successful launch of Hi-Fi Rush. So let’s think about that for a minute. What happens with that studio now that The Guy from the studio, the one who made them, is gone? Do they try to find another legend in the making – something that’s a 1-in-a-million shot at the best of times – and restructure? Or do they dissolve and do something else? This is pure speculation, but we don’t know that this isn’t something that studio wasn’t talking about anyway. The press release today doesn’t cover that at all. Let’s look at two of their recent games also.

Hi-Fi Rush, while a runaway success despite a crazy shadow drop, and the recipient of a handful of awards and nominated for more than a dozen more, sold fairly well for a small title. But is only noted as having reached some 3 million players in its first month after release. Which is great for a small game…but not actually a huge number of sales in the grand scheme of things. If Gamepass really has 25 million subscribers, then a comparatively small number of them actually played or bought it. There were even rumors that Xbox was unhappy with its sales performance, despite it being a pretty instant success.

The other most recent is Ghostwire Tokyo. Was a good game with a weird style and vibe and a neat tribute to Japanese culture. However, it released to some controversy for two reasons. The first was timed console exclusivity, which inevitably sparked a war online that went on for too long(it’s always too long, ugh) and, people can say what they want, that kind of thing always hurts the discourse around games and damages the image of a game. The other reason was that the game ran poorly at launch on both PS5 and PC, which pushed people away from it. So by the time the game released on Xbox, the general public awareness had already more or less shuffled Ghostwire right on out. I can’t imagine this was ignored by the devs or their parent company, nor can I imagine that it wasn’t felt in sales numbers coming in way below the projections.

Looking at those things…well, suddenly, I have less confusion as to why Tango was closed. If both my last two games failed to make the money I needed them to make and I lost the creative genius who was making games for me in the first place….

Yeah, I might decide to do something else too.

So now let’s look at the other big one: Arkane Austin. Looking into their recent history, this closure makes a lot more sense to me now too. Arkane’s always had a thing for releasing cult classics. Games that fans love but didn’t sell super well, with Dishonored 2 and Prey(2017) being the most recent examples. After Prey underperformed commercially, Arkane was looking for a broader appeal, on top of Zenimax, their parent company, pushing most of their developers to make live service games and inject MTX into everything. In the search for this, Arkane hit on the idea of creating a multiplayer take on their brand of FPS games, the “immersive sim”. Well, according to staff that worked on Redfall, the studio was plagued with problems throughout the entire development. Due to NDAs about the game, prospective employees couldn’t be told details about the game they were being hired to work on, not to mention being told that the company was looking for devs with experience with multiplayer shooters, when most of the applicants came to Arkane looking to work on ImSims. Zenimax also had a reputation for paying less than averages wages, and getting more liberal or progressive developers to move to Texas is a challenging proposition in any case, just due to Texas’s conservative political and social climates. Combine all that with confused or unclear direction from the creative leads and that some 70% of the staff had left by the time Redfall released and suddenly, this studio going away makes more sense. That’s three big budget projects in a row that didn’t pan out, and one of those flopped in truly spectacular fashion.

Again, after researching for a little bit, I find myself much less confused about this closure.

The other two are less controversial because they’re relatively unknown studios. Alpha Dog Games has only made a handful of mobile games, including Mighty Doom, the oldDoom rogue-lite. They got bought up by Zenimax, most likely because of Mighty Doom, and have been integrated into the Xbox mobile gaming division. So I don’t really see this as a “closure” as more they gave the team a better salary and benefits, if less identity. Roundhouse Studios, you’ve literally never played a game by them as they’ve never released any. They did some outsourcing work for Redfall but other than that, likely the only thing you’d know them for is for being Human Head Studios prior, which only had one noteworthy game: Prey(2006). Another commercial flop, even if wildly creative and actually a lot of fun. I have a hard time even thinking of them as a “studio” in their own right, as Human Head dissolved itself by choice after filing for bankruptcy and sought out Zenimax for an acquistion. So closing Roadhouse Games, to me, is a big shrug.

Sorry, not sorry, guys. I tried to like Brink but…well…let’s move on.

So history lessons and pondering on ramifications aside, my conclusion here is that these studios were closed because they weren’t profitable or really providing anything. I just read two stories of repeated commercial failures that were nevertheless fun to play(usually), one about a legendary developer that finally came to a close, and one about a company that did what it set out to do: make some mobile games til they got picked up by a bigger company.

Now I can’t say whether or not Xbox had anything to do with any of this. The only one they really could have had much influence over in the past was Arkane with Redfall, but even then, Phil Spencer flat out said multiple times that they were way too hands-off with Redfall and really needed to rethink how they looked at game projects in the future, due to the extremely poor launch of the game.

I’m not usually one to jump on the doom&gloom bandwagon that’s surrounded Xbox for so long now, but I gotta say: some clarity of messaging here would be REALLY appreciated. Today as I was scrolling X reading about it, everyone was dumping on Phil Spencer and Satya Nadella and, after doing a little reading, I suspect this stuff was all going to happen already anyway whether Xbox was in charge or not.

Having Xbox come out and say WHY they’re doing this would be pretty rad though. Just sayin’.

So just remember fellow Gamers™: emails and memos like that tell very, very little. Maybe try to curb the blinding outrage for a minute and look at the larger picture, or look at the individual companies in question. They’re basically all public entities, so you can easily google information about them for yourself and find out why they might be being closed, rather than just assuming that the evil megacorps are coming for all your left socks and going to take them via MTX!

Happy Gaming!

(P.S.: If all this equates to Bethesda putting more people into their projects and more games out, faster, and I get to play Elder Scrolls 6 before I turn 50, I’ll be happy.)