Shock and Anger as Xbox Shuts Down Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and More
Shock and Anger as Xbox Shuts Down Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and More
The video game industry has reacted with shock and anger after Xbox shut down several game studios today, May 7, 2024 including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, the developers of Redfall and Hi-Fi Rush respectively.
No no, xbox buying these companies is going to be good for gaming! It's going to increase game production because it's so efficient!
Every capitalist wank last year talking about how all the mergers were wonderful.
The stupid thing is it totally could have made things better. Facilitated knowledge share, floated work between studios if one needed help, heck, just combining HR and publishing tools could have freed up some costs that could feed back into development. Something.
But yeah, saw it coming
None of these companies create jobs, none of them create competition, none of them foster creativity, none of them innovate. Global monopolies are a blight.
And I'm not going to let doom scrolling and apathy deter me from trying to change things. At least I emailed my congressman today
Hopefully this doesnt steamroll into a Embracer situation.
Still, pretty obnoxious of Microsoft to buy these studios, just to close them.
Buying something and shutting it down shouldn't be possible. You don't want to own it anymore? Great, they're independent, good luck have fun. But you didn't do anything, to say it stopped existing. It is a purely theoretical act. No factory was torn down, no warehouse was liquidated. A video game studio is just a bunch of folks who come in to work on the same thing every weekday. Games are made of labor. If the money stops flowing, that's a problem, but it shouldn't be a light-switch existential termination.
If the studios had the resources they could easily become independent. But the corporate side owns the rights to their works, so the now independent studio doesn't have any incoming revenue.
The average employee won't work for scraps or nothing. So it's effectively over if big corpo cuts them off.
There should be no shock from this. This happens everytime.
What happens to the talent at these studios?
Are all these buyouts just a way to force hire workers.
This is awful. What happens to the games themselves? I haven't played hifi rush yet but it's been on my list.
Hifi Rush is in Humble Choice this month, and I noticed they have a redemption deadline which is a bit out of the ordinary. So it's possible it'll get delisted, or maybe Humble is just playing it safe with the keys they have.
Oh I'll check it out on there then thanks for the headsup
It could get delisted in the future if there were any licensing deals, although that can happen for any game. If you already own it on Steam you'll be able to keep downloading and playing it indefinitely.
Nothing.
I don't know but it still hasn't been cracked... I imagine things would be very bad if they decide to pull it for some reason...
Hi-Fi Rush is a blast and I highly recommend it.