To this he then added that he could not afford the luxury of managing an unprofitable business within Microsoft, returning to the concept of growth of the entire sector, which at the moment is struggling to find new players and makes it difficult for many workers to be able to build a career. The fact remains that It’s difficult to build a career if you get fired from one day to the nexteven when previously its results were praised by the company’s top management, just to demonstrate to shareholders that it is growing.
This obviously does not make the closure of other studios legitimate just because they are underperforming in terms of sales and quality of the games developed. Especially Arkane Austin, which, despite the failure of Redfalla cooperative multiplayer shooter full of vampires, was a studio with great potential, given the excellent titles created previously. Redfall has had a troubled developmentaccording to a Bloomberg report, precisely because it was born as a multiplayer title in a company specialized in single player games, causing many problems and discontent among developers, so much so that 70% of those who had started development had left once reached the end of the project.
According to some rumors, made more credible by seeing recent statements, the real reason behind the closure of these studios is a consequence of the nearly $70 billion spent on the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Microsoft’s top brass would now be breathing much more down their necks on the gaming division, which given the investments made must prove to be positive. Studios like Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks had just released their latest projects last year, while new ones are still in early development. For many years therefore, these two studies would have been only a cost without profit for the gaming part of Xbox, and hence the cut to show that the division led by Phil Spencer is in the positive. An absolute contradiction if this were the truth, because how will they ever be able to earn in the future if they don’t invest in those who have to play the games?
A great gamble
Man grows by making mistakes; only by making mistakes does he learn to avoid them and so he evolves. Yet it now seems that the luxury of making mistakes is no longer allowed in the video game industry, where at the first mistake, even if you have always done well before, you are deprived of any possibility of redemption, demanding success at all costs. Yet, as the case of Tango Gameworks demonstrates, even doing well is no longer enoughmaking working in the gaming industry even more frustrating than it already was.
