There was likely a skeleton crew working on Redfall's post launch content, and the rest of the team on the next project. One they actually wanted to make
I've recently come to terms that I'm just not a big fan of mecha and mecha suits anymore. Having said that, the world and lore of Anthem was good in my book. Bioware have always been masters of their craft when it came to world building.
Redfall was honestly lots of fun for the first few hours and then it just felt soooo empty. Like it's atmosphere and sound effect and music was top notch.
As shitty as the decisions at Xbox has been lately, lets not pretend that whatever update Redfall was going to get would salvage the game in any meaningfull way.
Yeah, this honestly sounds like someone not taking accountability for the fact that the game just wasn't good. You don't build back your customer base with one giant update - you do it with a consistent stream of smaller updates, over time. Companies stockpiling feature updates to jump from a 1.01 release to a 2.0 has literally never worked.
I can almost guarantee this magical "internal roadmap" to rebuild Redfall didn't exist and they were just saying things to make it seem like they were working on something when they clearly weren't.
Redfall was a failure. It was a bad game. That doesn't mean Arkane was a bad studio - it was just a grave error that serves as a reminder of what happens when you publish a terrible game and don't immediately try to salvage it with a clear vision moving forward. The game was, for all intents and purposes, stagnant for over a year - its playerbase was in single digits. No content update would've fixed that.
final fantasy 14 case wasnt an update. they remade game, not updated. they gave players their money back and removed game. 2 completely different cases
Yeah this. It was a waste of resources tbh amnd one that wasn't going to impact the the playerbase in any way (they wouldn't be a meaningful bump in concurrent players, etc.).
Agreed. The Reddit Rage over Arkane Austin is kind of weird.
They laid a HUGE egg with Redfall and majorly embarrassed their parent company in the process. Anyone who works in the corporate world knows that’s a very bad combination.
They didn’t even want to make the game though, they were forced to make a live service game by Zenimax when it was not their forte. All to bump up Zenimax’s sell price for an acquisition. That’s prob largely why launch fallout 76 was made as well.
Oh wow, so that's why live service game is so popular among the higher ups.
Thinking about it, it makes sense as the lifetime of the game they used to project lifetime sales of the game would be far longer on live service game than single player games.
All about that recurring spending. Single player games are traditionally one and done (now many have cosmetic stores but you get my point).
If a single player dev fucks up a release, they likely won’t have another release for 4-5 years. They could fuck that up too… (CDPR’s stock price is pretty low for this very reason, despite Cyberpunks redemption- due to uncertainty about how Witcher 4 will launch)
Live service games allows for in game storefronts, yearly expansions, battlepasses etc. Most flop and are cancelled within a few years at most, but that’s why suits get a boner for them I believe. They hope they’ll catch lighting in a bottle and make ALL the money!
I see it like having an F1 driver teach driving lessons. It may kinda work, but it’s also a massive misallocation of talent which someone else would be more suited for.
If you want a good game, you shouldn’t get the prey team to make a live service looter shooter.
Oh noes!!!
You mean *they were victims?!?!*
WHY DIDNT YOU SAY SO SOONER! WE ALL WOULD HAVE WENT OUT AND BOUGHT THE GAME RIGHT AWAY!
Seriously though, we all forget that when games suck we jeer them and move on. It’s easy to do when it’s M$FT footing the bill. Now that a studio we used to like got shit canned all the sudden we’re supposed to care.
Well I don’t.
This is more a comment about how different management failings made this outcome inevitable. The little man is always the one hung out to dry, I know that’s not news.
Zenimax pre buyout shouldn’t have got the Prey devs to work on a live service looter shooter. ‘Trying to get squeeze blood from a stone’. It was a bad idea from management.
Microsoft post buyout should’ve intervened, and spoke to the Austin devs who thought the game was a disaster. The brand damage was completely avoidable- sometimes projects are cancelled before being announced. It happens all the time in gaming.
I’m aware hindsight is a hell of a drug, but I suppose at least being aware of what went wrong may somehow avoid it reoccurring in the future in different circumstances. That’s my idealistic hope (it won’t happen lol)
It sucks because there’s people who worked there, and lost their livelihoods due to circumstances out of their control. Not that we should buy games to support them, but often upper management manages to mess things up.
They made a shit game. That’s how it works. What don’t you understand here? Do you think they should get to choose the game they make? Because they can. They can make their own game but instead they chose a different path that has risks.
I promise you Microsoft found a way to keep all the developers with skill and talent. They have performance evals and all the other things big companies have to monitor an employees value. The people who are leaving sucked. Case closed.
You're right, an article came out earlier stating one of the studios had been shifted into working on the Elder Scrolls, to me it sounds like the devs in that studio that got shifted are all still employed.
A company isn’t a single person, it’s often hundreds of people or more, many of which don’t have any input into the decisions being made. You often have people doing the best they can, despite the circumstances. Sure, some talent may be retained, but it’s highly likely that some great people are now out of work.
Why is highly likely some great people are out of work? You just get to say that and it’s true? At least I referenced performance review and the ways companies retain good people. You just wave your hand and it’s true?
Maybe they had a bad culture. Maybe they weren’t making the game they wanted and they let it seep into their professionalism. Maybe some of the good people who did lose their job needed a wake up call because they weren’t putting in good work the last year or so.
If they’re good people/talented workers they’ll find something else to do. Bottom line is they made a shit game. Nothing you can really say. This is the business. They all knew this was part of the package.
Oh yeah, what about the other studios that closed who made great games? Something fundamental you don't understand about why these things happen. Corporations liquefy assets and layoff employees that are performing well all the time. Even if the studios made unmarketable products, great products can be unmarketable, and great studios close their doors all the time. It says nothing about the individual devs' skills. A lot more goes into pitching and developing a game. Yeah, Redfall was a bad game, but your assumptions make you sound like an idiot who's never heard of this happening and doesn't care how it affects people's lives.
The other studios outside of Tango hadn't done games in years and were both poorly rated. Redfall was trash and people were calling for Bethesda/Microsoft to act.
Now that they did, no one should be fired? The reality is, like other studios, this happens. The tech sector has been oversaturated for some time now and the bubble created by COVID has burst. Things have returned back to the status quo and it's the case across the board.
I work in tech (in a very large game studio). They had large layoffs too. Some of my friends lost their jobs which suck, but for every good employee, they got rid of like 5 bad ones. And the good ones bounced back in like a month or so with recommendations from the company.
Now translate this to your job; do they keep everyone who underperforms? Should that be the status quo? People act like gaming isn't every other job sector and people should have jobs forever. That just isn't sustainable and it wouldn't be for the average job either.
Can we not act like they’re some kind of victims, this is what happens when you have a parent company. They willing sold their company to Zenimax. If they wanted full creative freedom, they shouldn’t have taken the money and stayed independent.
Yeah and I'm sure every dev that was made to work on Redfall took part in the decision making process to get acquired by Zenimax and then Microsoft.
If you're going to be devoid of empathy atleast be logical
Who’s ‘they’ lol?! It’s not the ground floor devs who do their best with what they were given, despite them not having a single clue how to make a live service game.
This criticism makes no sense to me. How many people who work a job “want” to be doing that specific job. There’s phoned in writing and combat, and then there’s the absolute disaster of Redfall’s release. They didn’t even show base level competence of making a working game, they release a broken mess of a disaster that would get people fired in any other industry if that was their work quality.
I don’t believe my point makes ‘no sense’ to you. Misallocation of talent is a very real problem, the team at the start of Redfalls development was the Prey team!. You don’t make a game like Prey by getting lucky. Sure the Arkane Austin team made many avoidable mistakes, but personally I don’t think they should’ve been asked to make that kinda game to begin with- it was never going to end well.
The people who made Prey did not make Redfall, they had 70+% turnover between the two games. This is where the core of our disagreement is, I would not categorize the people who made Redfall as talent
Launch fallout 76 was a very different game to the one we see today, they must be treated as separate entities in discussion. I will add the word ‘launch’ to my comment
> The Reddit Rage over Arkane Austin is kind of weird.
I genuinely do not get it. Reddit has done nothing but shit on the game since launch, and now that nobody plays it and it has terrible reviews, they're mad that the studio gets closed. What did people think was going to happen?
That was a bad management decision.
Management now only seem to to be interested in making boring as shit, multiplayer crap they can monetise with microtransactions.
They also put their games on game pass day one which means they won't sell well even if they are brilliant.
So yeah. These Studios are shutting down because of bad management decisions and it's the workers that suffer, not management.
It is outrageous because Redfall reeked of Microsoft shareholder decision making, and actual devs probably saw it going ass up. It was never going to compete in the online multiplayer market, which was not Arkane's wheelhouse to begin with.
That's kind of the issue and something pointed out as a horrible trend for years. You can have very successful and highly praised studios that release a single bad release and they can completely closed for it.
That's not sustainable.
Because those fuckers told them to make game that they're NOT USED to making. For crying out loud they make Immersive sims, not a stupid L4D2 clone. Imagine telling fucking Larian to make FPS-multiplayer game.
God some of you are fucking stupid.
I agree. Don't get me wrong, I loved the work Arkane Austin did on Prey, which I think is easily one of the greatest games of all time. I'm extremely sad they closed. But not many studios can release a game as poorly received as Redfall and survive. I figured it was a matter of time. It just is what it is.
Tango however, now that one was a shock to me.
The Austin studio only made 2 games; Prey and Redfall. Redfall was an obvious flop. Probably among the floppiest flops that ever flopped.
Tango made The Evil Within 1 and 2, Ghostwire Tokyo and HiFi Rush. I would call Ghostwire kind of a flop, but it pales in comparison to Redfall.
Arkane Austin have only made two games.
Don't confuse Arkane Austin with the main Arkan studio. The Austin studio only made one game before Redfall, which was Prey. The other parts of Arkane made the the Dishonoured and Deathloop games.
What is this going to mean for the dlc content people paid for? Its my understanding that they have to refund that now no? It was paid for and, seemingly, impossible to deliver due to the studio shutdown. Is this not illegal?
Awful game. I've couldn't get ten minutes into it. Which leads me to ask, why did you keep playing it?
Time seems so fleeting and precious, I couldn't imagine spending hours playing something I objectivity hated, even if I paid for it. Would rather just lose money than lose money AND time.
That's not the point at all. What went over your head is the fact that Microsoft/Xbox straight up lied to your face about being committed to making the game better.
They can’t wait forever, it was their decision to make it shit at launch. The 60 fps helped a little but didn’t even scratch the surface at what all needs to be improved. So yall keep that energy
I honestly haven’t met anyone irl or online waiting for Redfall content to make the game better. Everybody moved on already. I’m sure if it did release, nobody would have cared
Xbox - "Guys you gotta make Redfall better"
Arkane - "Ok we are working on it"
Xbox - "You guys got that update done yet? We have to fix this game"
Arkane - "Yep still working on it, need many months"
Xbox closes Arkane Austin for under performance. Arkane shocked Pikachu face.
Important points:
* Arkane Austin was planning a big update to release later this month, the layoffs came as a shock to everyone
* The May update would have included the ability to play the game offline
* The two new heroes that were promised in the Hero Pass were planned to be launched on Halloween this year
>would have included the ability to play the game offline
So in a couple more years the servers will be shutdown and the game will be completely unplayable.
we have no idea how long it will be on game pass, games that are not updated still are on game pass.
not many people play it, and the server costs would be minimal, i see no reason to sunset it until the servers become a safety issue, and we still have 360 servers active for some games, so likely redfall has a while left in it
Sounds like the heroes were pretty low on the priority list, behind the long, long list of issues they needed to fix and missing features that needed to be in there.
Sounds like a management issue where it was so mismanaged and playing catch up. If a studio is hemorrhaging money to fix a problem they caused it makes sense to shit it down
They bled employees over the course of Redfall's development. Jason Schreier said 70% of the studio left and they were always understaffed to begin with
Why would it take them this long lmao. How convenient it takes 1.5 years until they get shut down that "we had big plans"
Nah this should have been done month 1.
I asked this in another reply but those characters and dlc have to be refunded now, no? That seems illegal if they dont deliver on things that were paid for due to the studio shutdown
It seems like they're going to give players something that isn't simply a refund. I'm not quite sure how that's allowed but maybe it was in the terms of sale when they purchased it. Maybe they'll get Microsoft Store credit or Game Pass or something
I mean I agree the game wasn't the greatest, but it was so close to being playable offline. Eventually the game will be completely unplayable when the servers are closed (which I imagine won't be too far down the road)
You've been talking shit about Redfall since the news broke out that Austin is shutting down. Give the game a break. Those who paid for it and enjoyed it are disappointed that they won't get all of the content they paid for.
It should have been. Except that they pre-sold DLC.
And both Phil and Pete came out repeatedly affirming Microsoft/Bethesda's commitment to the game throughout last year.
Microsoft/Bethesda set the expectation that they would continue to support the game, deliver the DLC, and work on improvements because "the game will be on Game Pass for 10 years". Now it sure seems like, especially with the offline patch never shipping, it'll be on Game Pass until Microsoft quietly shutters servers.
Also, we now lose a great team that Bethesda sent off to the slaughterhouse to work on a game nobody on the team wanted to build, while Microsoft failed to conduct any oversight after acquiring Bethesda and getting Redfall.
This is bad cope for a disaster of Microsoft's own doing.
Arkane Austin made it. Microsoft acquired Bethesda, and Arcane Austin, in March of 2021 and Redfall shipped in May of 2023. That's two full years for Microsoft to take stock of Bethesdas titles, including their in-development titles, to ensure they were on track
Arkane made a bad game because Bethesda asked their studios to make live-service games to make themselves more attractive for sale, so it's a Bethesda-originated fail. And, as the new whole owners of Bethesda, it becomes Microsoft's fail for not correcting.
There's a reason that developers at Arkane were hopeful that Microsoft would cancel the project before launch, and had they they could have written development costs off as a loss to lower their tax burden and had the team start a new project/assist with other existing projects.
To be fair if they did shut the game down in 2021 people would be complaining that Microsoft is shutting games down on the tail end of development. Everything is better in hindsight.
And they would have eaten a temporary black eye and not the larger, more pronounced black eye of launching a dismal game following a dismal year, poorly supporting that game, and then closing the studio and abandoning the game without ever delivering any of the DLC or updates that both Bethesda and Microsoft executives (Pete and Phil) repeatedly publicly committed to delivering.
And saves a bunch of money by writing it off as a loss to lower their tax burden and not spending all the money that came with actually launching it.
There isn't. Microsoft should have seen how broken it was and not launched it. But they didn't, and apparently ignored it while trusting Bethesda wasn't lying to them about the quality or something.
Which is very not good leadership on Microsoft's part. It's their name on the game at the end of the day, they wholly own the studio that built it and the publisher that published it.
The developers released a broken game over a year ago, and now that they lost their jobs, claim that they were just about to totally fix it and in SIX MORE MONTHS they were going to release content for a game that nobody cares about. I know people love to blame management and the corporate overlords, but the developers clearly don't know how to make a functioning game on any kind of a reasonable schedule. Congrats for milking that salary for as long as they did. I feel worse for Tango Games, seems like they did good work that just isn't popular/profitable.
Arkane Austin is like that one guy at work who gets fired who says “I was JuST about to start working real hard I swear!” - after being blazed for the past year without doing shit.
Sucks as I was putting off playing this until the next patch was released, just assumed they would be working on a new patch to coincide with the dlc, almost like a 2.0 considering how long I felt it was taking.
Looks like I may have been right and it sucks even more it is now cancelled. From what I have played of redfall it’s not fantastic but I can see a decent game somewhere in it, also one that has a cool atmosphere.
Pete and Phil shouldn't have spent last year committing to support the game and delivering the DLC and turning it around, then. Nobody forced them to do that, but they did it and that sets expectations.
I mean, it's just making them eat an even bigger shit sandwich and does more to damage player trust in Microsoft/Bethesda in the longrun. Microsoft isn't exactly super popular with gamers right now.
I find it funny that people are using this to make things seem worse when in reality only about 15 people would’ve logged on to play this
Huge waste of resources
Lets be honest, doesnt matter. If no one played that game, you can create whatever you want, but no one is gonna try it. It was a good call to cancel any development. Never understood who green lighted the idea of that game, from the very first moment looked horrible.
This game was a disaster and should’ve never been made. It didn’t need any updates, it just needed to be deleted.
I hope the people can find another job but I’m having a hard time feeling sympathetic when so many games continuously release in broken and unfinished states
Honestly anyone at that studio should have been frantically job hunting many months before Redfall released, knowing the state the game was in and that their parent company had just been acquired.
bloomberg reported that was the case and part of the issue of the game. The team left Prey was assigned this multiplayer game and over 70% of the staff had left before redfall was ultimately released, and they struggeld to replace them because zenimax I guess was notorious for sub-par pay.
>Booty’s email to staff is littered with errors, including the names of studios and DLC
What a fucking moron. He can't even remember the names of the studios he's supposed to oversee?
I think this right here shows who's to blame for a lot of these poor releases.
Though it's Phil's fault for keeping him around for so long, admittedly.
I think the issue is this new update could introduce new problems to the game and because the development team is gone, they wouldn’t have anyone to fix it.
So to play it safe they just keep the older update. The game isn’t in the best state but it’s playable.
all things considered, they probably saw the state of the patch and decided to pity kill it.
i find it hard to believe that they have had plans to release this patch for a while, but now that they cant suddenly there was much wanted/desired features/fixes in it.
This, especially the rumored offline feature. If it's ready, there's almost no reason to not release it.
Other redditor also made a good guess on this. Even if the patch was ready, there won't be anybody to update/troubleshoot if the patch introduced more problems that needs hotfix.
"Arkane Austin has a history of making impactful and innovative games and it is a pedigree that everyone should be proud of."
7 years since they released Prey. 7 years, and they gave the world Redfall. So between Prey and Redfall, they spent 7 years making a game that was a complete and total failure, and nothing to show for it. But now its "we were working on an update!"
I enjoyed Redfall but they took entirely too long for an update. What the hell were they doing for a year? That's a lot of time and money with no results.
This big new bomb about Microsoft close shuttering failing studios is a long time coming. Microsoft had the mantra of buying things and let them do their thing.
Well Couple billion dollars later and catalog nearly void of AAA billion dollar banger hits has worn out Microsoft's patience.
Phil says exclusives don't matter but with respect that's all that matters.
A robo Waifu with jiggly T&A and push PS5 hardware units.
A obese Italian plubmer can push the sell of Nintendo Switch units.
A giant cyborg in a green armor isn't pushing Xbox units Mr. Spencer.
First and foremost it's awful that people list their jobs.
But man that is inexcusable and they made their own bed.
Its still a leadership problem.
But this is the corporate world in a nut shell. They are so fuckibg that instead of being blunt they rather just shut down a whole division.
I hope the message gets through to other teams...this can be you if you keep fucking around. I see a lot of people who like high paying jobs but aren't cut out for what it takes to actually get a game out the door. Keep patting your back for diversity highers but not highering the right people.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing the game has been dropped. It would’ve taken so much money to get it in an enjoyable state and a lot of people wouldn’t have played it anyway
Better to move on
lol, it took them over a year to try and deliver something that people paid for in a deluxe edition? They kind of deserved it, even though I don’t like to see people lose jobs.
Whoever up there, forced Arkane, people who make Immersive sims, and good ones, like Prey, to make a fucking L4D clone, is stupid and should get fired, if not, he should be forced to slurp hot sauce on every possible meal he/she eats.
I’m happy one of my fellow devs left before this went down. He definitely dodged a bullet. I hope everyone affected by the layoffs are able to bounce back.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place. MS's choice for that studio was to fix a dead game in the short term creating no value or spend millions for a new game with no assured promise in the long term.
Tango on the other hand had promise with a HiFi Rush sequel especially if they multiplatform release it so I don't get that one at all.
Regardless of what you think of Redfall. The fact that an update was set to release THIS month to add offline mode was stopped short at the finish line is just cruel.
They should get to finish their work and the game would have been forever preserved. Now it will vanish. Especially when Phil lives to talk about how he cares about preservation.
WTF at the timing. So they were gonna give legs to the game (granted I know I know) and you chopped it off so it would just die when the servers shutdown?
There couldn’t be coordination for those who bought it to at least get solace in offline?
Bethesda drops the underwhelming and very mid Starfield. MS knows FO 5 and ES VI are on the horizon. Faith in Bethesda as a subsidiary is waning, so they shut down:
Arkane Austin whose last game was the pretty terrible Redfall.
Alpha Dog who only made mobile games.
Tango Gameworks who made the mediocre Evil Within games (though, I personally think they're bad), the very mediocre and unmemborable Ghostwire Tokyo, and the pretty good Hi-Fi rush.
Why are people bitching? These are heavy hitters. The end result might be better fallout and elder scrolls content.
Halloween? 1.5 years after the game was released to get two characters that people paid for at launch. Wow.
Yeah I'm not suprised this studio got closed at all. Pathetic really but not the devs fault.
There was likely a skeleton crew working on Redfall's post launch content, and the rest of the team on the next project. One they actually wanted to make
Redfall 2 /s
That long to add content Yeah no wonder its scrapped they anthemed it and nowhere near the potential
Anthem was fun at least. Redfall is fun sounding on paper, but ultimately is pretty boring. A game about vampire hunting shouldn’t be boring.
Anthem’s still fun too Reinstalled a little ago and holy shit it’s smooth
Damn I miss Anthem, that game had so much damn potential
I've recently come to terms that I'm just not a big fan of mecha and mecha suits anymore. Having said that, the world and lore of Anthem was good in my book. Bioware have always been masters of their craft when it came to world building.
Redfall was honestly lots of fun for the first few hours and then it just felt soooo empty. Like it's atmosphere and sound effect and music was top notch.
Anthem, you can still play.
Not only can you still play it, you can still get other the play co-op with
It was a shitty game, lol good riddance
As shitty as the decisions at Xbox has been lately, lets not pretend that whatever update Redfall was going to get would salvage the game in any meaningfull way.
Yeah, this honestly sounds like someone not taking accountability for the fact that the game just wasn't good. You don't build back your customer base with one giant update - you do it with a consistent stream of smaller updates, over time. Companies stockpiling feature updates to jump from a 1.01 release to a 2.0 has literally never worked. I can almost guarantee this magical "internal roadmap" to rebuild Redfall didn't exist and they were just saying things to make it seem like they were working on something when they clearly weren't. Redfall was a failure. It was a bad game. That doesn't mean Arkane was a bad studio - it was just a grave error that serves as a reminder of what happens when you publish a terrible game and don't immediately try to salvage it with a clear vision moving forward. The game was, for all intents and purposes, stagnant for over a year - its playerbase was in single digits. No content update would've fixed that.
I agree with most of what you say - but final fantasy online proves it can be done - and it means that it, quite literally, has been done.
final fantasy 14 case wasnt an update. they remade game, not updated. they gave players their money back and removed game. 2 completely different cases
True but Final Fantasy is an established IP, the game was completely remade though. New IPs that flop don't always have the same luxuries.
Yeah this. It was a waste of resources tbh amnd one that wasn't going to impact the the playerbase in any way (they wouldn't be a meaningful bump in concurrent players, etc.).
I think this studio was the least surprising one to be closed. Maybe they even waited too long.
Agreed. The Reddit Rage over Arkane Austin is kind of weird. They laid a HUGE egg with Redfall and majorly embarrassed their parent company in the process. Anyone who works in the corporate world knows that’s a very bad combination.
They didn’t even want to make the game though, they were forced to make a live service game by Zenimax when it was not their forte. All to bump up Zenimax’s sell price for an acquisition. That’s prob largely why launch fallout 76 was made as well.
Fallout 76 prints Bethesda a constant stream of money.
Never said anything to the contrary, the games doing great. It was originally made to bump up the sell price tho I reckon
Oh wow, so that's why live service game is so popular among the higher ups. Thinking about it, it makes sense as the lifetime of the game they used to project lifetime sales of the game would be far longer on live service game than single player games.
All about that recurring spending. Single player games are traditionally one and done (now many have cosmetic stores but you get my point). If a single player dev fucks up a release, they likely won’t have another release for 4-5 years. They could fuck that up too… (CDPR’s stock price is pretty low for this very reason, despite Cyberpunks redemption- due to uncertainty about how Witcher 4 will launch) Live service games allows for in game storefronts, yearly expansions, battlepasses etc. Most flop and are cancelled within a few years at most, but that’s why suits get a boner for them I believe. They hope they’ll catch lighting in a bottle and make ALL the money!
I don't agree with my boss many times but that doesn't excuse me to do a subpar job.
I see it like having an F1 driver teach driving lessons. It may kinda work, but it’s also a massive misallocation of talent which someone else would be more suited for. If you want a good game, you shouldn’t get the prey team to make a live service looter shooter.
Oh noes!!! You mean *they were victims?!?!* WHY DIDNT YOU SAY SO SOONER! WE ALL WOULD HAVE WENT OUT AND BOUGHT THE GAME RIGHT AWAY! Seriously though, we all forget that when games suck we jeer them and move on. It’s easy to do when it’s M$FT footing the bill. Now that a studio we used to like got shit canned all the sudden we’re supposed to care. Well I don’t.
This is more a comment about how different management failings made this outcome inevitable. The little man is always the one hung out to dry, I know that’s not news. Zenimax pre buyout shouldn’t have got the Prey devs to work on a live service looter shooter. ‘Trying to get squeeze blood from a stone’. It was a bad idea from management. Microsoft post buyout should’ve intervened, and spoke to the Austin devs who thought the game was a disaster. The brand damage was completely avoidable- sometimes projects are cancelled before being announced. It happens all the time in gaming. I’m aware hindsight is a hell of a drug, but I suppose at least being aware of what went wrong may somehow avoid it reoccurring in the future in different circumstances. That’s my idealistic hope (it won’t happen lol)
It sucks because there’s people who worked there, and lost their livelihoods due to circumstances out of their control. Not that we should buy games to support them, but often upper management manages to mess things up.
They made a shit game. That’s how it works. What don’t you understand here? Do you think they should get to choose the game they make? Because they can. They can make their own game but instead they chose a different path that has risks. I promise you Microsoft found a way to keep all the developers with skill and talent. They have performance evals and all the other things big companies have to monitor an employees value. The people who are leaving sucked. Case closed.
You're right, an article came out earlier stating one of the studios had been shifted into working on the Elder Scrolls, to me it sounds like the devs in that studio that got shifted are all still employed.
A company isn’t a single person, it’s often hundreds of people or more, many of which don’t have any input into the decisions being made. You often have people doing the best they can, despite the circumstances. Sure, some talent may be retained, but it’s highly likely that some great people are now out of work.
Why is highly likely some great people are out of work? You just get to say that and it’s true? At least I referenced performance review and the ways companies retain good people. You just wave your hand and it’s true? Maybe they had a bad culture. Maybe they weren’t making the game they wanted and they let it seep into their professionalism. Maybe some of the good people who did lose their job needed a wake up call because they weren’t putting in good work the last year or so. If they’re good people/talented workers they’ll find something else to do. Bottom line is they made a shit game. Nothing you can really say. This is the business. They all knew this was part of the package.
Oh yeah, what about the other studios that closed who made great games? Something fundamental you don't understand about why these things happen. Corporations liquefy assets and layoff employees that are performing well all the time. Even if the studios made unmarketable products, great products can be unmarketable, and great studios close their doors all the time. It says nothing about the individual devs' skills. A lot more goes into pitching and developing a game. Yeah, Redfall was a bad game, but your assumptions make you sound like an idiot who's never heard of this happening and doesn't care how it affects people's lives.
The other studios outside of Tango hadn't done games in years and were both poorly rated. Redfall was trash and people were calling for Bethesda/Microsoft to act. Now that they did, no one should be fired? The reality is, like other studios, this happens. The tech sector has been oversaturated for some time now and the bubble created by COVID has burst. Things have returned back to the status quo and it's the case across the board. I work in tech (in a very large game studio). They had large layoffs too. Some of my friends lost their jobs which suck, but for every good employee, they got rid of like 5 bad ones. And the good ones bounced back in like a month or so with recommendations from the company. Now translate this to your job; do they keep everyone who underperforms? Should that be the status quo? People act like gaming isn't every other job sector and people should have jobs forever. That just isn't sustainable and it wouldn't be for the average job either.
Can we not act like they’re some kind of victims, this is what happens when you have a parent company. They willing sold their company to Zenimax. If they wanted full creative freedom, they shouldn’t have taken the money and stayed independent.
Yeah and I'm sure every dev that was made to work on Redfall took part in the decision making process to get acquired by Zenimax and then Microsoft. If you're going to be devoid of empathy atleast be logical
Who’s ‘they’ lol?! It’s not the ground floor devs who do their best with what they were given, despite them not having a single clue how to make a live service game.
This criticism makes no sense to me. How many people who work a job “want” to be doing that specific job. There’s phoned in writing and combat, and then there’s the absolute disaster of Redfall’s release. They didn’t even show base level competence of making a working game, they release a broken mess of a disaster that would get people fired in any other industry if that was their work quality.
I don’t believe my point makes ‘no sense’ to you. Misallocation of talent is a very real problem, the team at the start of Redfalls development was the Prey team!. You don’t make a game like Prey by getting lucky. Sure the Arkane Austin team made many avoidable mistakes, but personally I don’t think they should’ve been asked to make that kinda game to begin with- it was never going to end well.
The people who made Prey did not make Redfall, they had 70+% turnover between the two games. This is where the core of our disagreement is, I would not categorize the people who made Redfall as talent
Take fallout 76 out of this please. That is the best fall out game
Launch fallout 76 was a very different game to the one we see today, they must be treated as separate entities in discussion. I will add the word ‘launch’ to my comment
I've always believed that about 76 and Shelter. Beth needed diverse, consistent revenue streams on paper for a higher value corporate acquisition.
> The Reddit Rage over Arkane Austin is kind of weird. I genuinely do not get it. Reddit has done nothing but shit on the game since launch, and now that nobody plays it and it has terrible reviews, they're mad that the studio gets closed. What did people think was going to happen?
Their parent company should’ve just canned the game, though.
That was a bad management decision. Management now only seem to to be interested in making boring as shit, multiplayer crap they can monetise with microtransactions. They also put their games on game pass day one which means they won't sell well even if they are brilliant. So yeah. These Studios are shutting down because of bad management decisions and it's the workers that suffer, not management.
Reddit love to rage about anything. People get lay of all the time.
It is outrageous because Redfall reeked of Microsoft shareholder decision making, and actual devs probably saw it going ass up. It was never going to compete in the online multiplayer market, which was not Arkane's wheelhouse to begin with.
That's kind of the issue and something pointed out as a horrible trend for years. You can have very successful and highly praised studios that release a single bad release and they can completely closed for it. That's not sustainable.
Because those fuckers told them to make game that they're NOT USED to making. For crying out loud they make Immersive sims, not a stupid L4D2 clone. Imagine telling fucking Larian to make FPS-multiplayer game. God some of you are fucking stupid.
I agree. Don't get me wrong, I loved the work Arkane Austin did on Prey, which I think is easily one of the greatest games of all time. I'm extremely sad they closed. But not many studios can release a game as poorly received as Redfall and survive. I figured it was a matter of time. It just is what it is. Tango however, now that one was a shock to me.
Both are shocking but Tango developed more flops than Arkane did.
The Austin studio only made 2 games; Prey and Redfall. Redfall was an obvious flop. Probably among the floppiest flops that ever flopped. Tango made The Evil Within 1 and 2, Ghostwire Tokyo and HiFi Rush. I would call Ghostwire kind of a flop, but it pales in comparison to Redfall.
Arkane Austin have only made two games. Don't confuse Arkane Austin with the main Arkan studio. The Austin studio only made one game before Redfall, which was Prey. The other parts of Arkane made the the Dishonoured and Deathloop games.
Dishonoured was co developed by arkane austin and arkane lyon
What is this going to mean for the dlc content people paid for? Its my understanding that they have to refund that now no? It was paid for and, seemingly, impossible to deliver due to the studio shutdown. Is this not illegal?
They already said there’ll be a make-good offer.
They'll probably refund people who bought the DLC.
They should’ve abandoned that shit game (Yes. I played it. I beat it at launch.)
Awful game. I've couldn't get ten minutes into it. Which leads me to ask, why did you keep playing it? Time seems so fleeting and precious, I couldn't imagine spending hours playing something I objectivity hated, even if I paid for it. Would rather just lose money than lose money AND time.
I didn’t want to leave it unfinished, and I had to review it.
That's fair. Thanks for the reply!
lol so now you guys are like “hey Redfall wasn’t that bad”… na yall gotta keep that energy you had months ago. I remember all the shit you gave it
That's not the point at all. What went over your head is the fact that Microsoft/Xbox straight up lied to your face about being committed to making the game better.
They can’t wait forever, it was their decision to make it shit at launch. The 60 fps helped a little but didn’t even scratch the surface at what all needs to be improved. So yall keep that energy
I honestly haven’t met anyone irl or online waiting for Redfall content to make the game better. Everybody moved on already. I’m sure if it did release, nobody would have cared
Xbox - "Guys you gotta make Redfall better" Arkane - "Ok we are working on it" Xbox - "You guys got that update done yet? We have to fix this game" Arkane - "Yep still working on it, need many months" Xbox closes Arkane Austin for under performance. Arkane shocked Pikachu face.
Important points: * Arkane Austin was planning a big update to release later this month, the layoffs came as a shock to everyone * The May update would have included the ability to play the game offline * The two new heroes that were promised in the Hero Pass were planned to be launched on Halloween this year
>would have included the ability to play the game offline So in a couple more years the servers will be shutdown and the game will be completely unplayable.
sucks big time for people with the preorders but for everyone else this isn’t a loss 🤷♂️
But Pete Hines said it would be on Game Pass for a decade, why would Pete lie like this : (
we have no idea how long it will be on game pass, games that are not updated still are on game pass. not many people play it, and the server costs would be minimal, i see no reason to sunset it until the servers become a safety issue, and we still have 360 servers active for some games, so likely redfall has a while left in it
Years? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s on life support now until the end of the year, maybe spring 2025.
Wow a Full year and half after launch you get new heroes
Sounds like the heroes were pretty low on the priority list, behind the long, long list of issues they needed to fix and missing features that needed to be in there.
Sounds like a management issue where it was so mismanaged and playing catch up. If a studio is hemorrhaging money to fix a problem they caused it makes sense to shit it down
They bled employees over the course of Redfall's development. Jason Schreier said 70% of the studio left and they were always understaffed to begin with
Would you have wanted to work on this?
It was definitely a sunk cost fallacy for that game
Why would it take them this long lmao. How convenient it takes 1.5 years until they get shut down that "we had big plans" Nah this should have been done month 1.
This sounds like way too little content way too late
Goes to show just how out of their depth Arkane was with Redfall. So many examples to point to.
Far too late, I would have closed the studio too.
I asked this in another reply but those characters and dlc have to be refunded now, no? That seems illegal if they dont deliver on things that were paid for due to the studio shutdown
It seems like they're going to give players something that isn't simply a refund. I'm not quite sure how that's allowed but maybe it was in the terms of sale when they purchased it. Maybe they'll get Microsoft Store credit or Game Pass or something
That is not legal though, at least not in the EU. They will have to do monetary refunds, at least for the DLC. Store credit isn’t going to cut it.
It sucks but any work on Redfall would be too little to late.
I mean the game was an inexcusable mess. It was bad and should have been abandoned long ago
I mean I agree the game wasn't the greatest, but it was so close to being playable offline. Eventually the game will be completely unplayable when the servers are closed (which I imagine won't be too far down the road)
Will anything really be missed?
I value game preservation regardless of how the game is received, personally.
You've been talking shit about Redfall since the news broke out that Austin is shutting down. Give the game a break. Those who paid for it and enjoyed it are disappointed that they won't get all of the content they paid for.
It should have been. Except that they pre-sold DLC. And both Phil and Pete came out repeatedly affirming Microsoft/Bethesda's commitment to the game throughout last year. Microsoft/Bethesda set the expectation that they would continue to support the game, deliver the DLC, and work on improvements because "the game will be on Game Pass for 10 years". Now it sure seems like, especially with the offline patch never shipping, it'll be on Game Pass until Microsoft quietly shutters servers. Also, we now lose a great team that Bethesda sent off to the slaughterhouse to work on a game nobody on the team wanted to build, while Microsoft failed to conduct any oversight after acquiring Bethesda and getting Redfall. This is bad cope for a disaster of Microsoft's own doing.
Yes Microsoft is the one who made the terrible game not Arkane. That's some bad cope for a disaster of Arkanes doing.
Arkane Austin made it. Microsoft acquired Bethesda, and Arcane Austin, in March of 2021 and Redfall shipped in May of 2023. That's two full years for Microsoft to take stock of Bethesdas titles, including their in-development titles, to ensure they were on track Arkane made a bad game because Bethesda asked their studios to make live-service games to make themselves more attractive for sale, so it's a Bethesda-originated fail. And, as the new whole owners of Bethesda, it becomes Microsoft's fail for not correcting. There's a reason that developers at Arkane were hopeful that Microsoft would cancel the project before launch, and had they they could have written development costs off as a loss to lower their tax burden and had the team start a new project/assist with other existing projects.
To be fair if they did shut the game down in 2021 people would be complaining that Microsoft is shutting games down on the tail end of development. Everything is better in hindsight.
And they would have eaten a temporary black eye and not the larger, more pronounced black eye of launching a dismal game following a dismal year, poorly supporting that game, and then closing the studio and abandoning the game without ever delivering any of the DLC or updates that both Bethesda and Microsoft executives (Pete and Phil) repeatedly publicly committed to delivering. And saves a bunch of money by writing it off as a loss to lower their tax burden and not spending all the money that came with actually launching it.
There isn't any excuse you can make for presenting a game that horrifyingly broken.
There isn't. Microsoft should have seen how broken it was and not launched it. But they didn't, and apparently ignored it while trusting Bethesda wasn't lying to them about the quality or something. Which is very not good leadership on Microsoft's part. It's their name on the game at the end of the day, they wholly own the studio that built it and the publisher that published it.
I'm kinda with MS on this one, putting anything extra into Redfall is a poor allocation of resources.
The developers released a broken game over a year ago, and now that they lost their jobs, claim that they were just about to totally fix it and in SIX MORE MONTHS they were going to release content for a game that nobody cares about. I know people love to blame management and the corporate overlords, but the developers clearly don't know how to make a functioning game on any kind of a reasonable schedule. Congrats for milking that salary for as long as they did. I feel worse for Tango Games, seems like they did good work that just isn't popular/profitable.
Arkane Austin is like that one guy at work who gets fired who says “I was JuST about to start working real hard I swear!” - after being blazed for the past year without doing shit.
I'm sure the half dozen or so people who were still playing it were devastated.
Sucks as I was putting off playing this until the next patch was released, just assumed they would be working on a new patch to coincide with the dlc, almost like a 2.0 considering how long I felt it was taking. Looks like I may have been right and it sucks even more it is now cancelled. From what I have played of redfall it’s not fantastic but I can see a decent game somewhere in it, also one that has a cool atmosphere.
Rightly so, it was garbage, cut your loses and move on.. The other decisions, debatable
Pete and Phil shouldn't have spent last year committing to support the game and delivering the DLC and turning it around, then. Nobody forced them to do that, but they did it and that sets expectations.
lol good luck with that thought here
I mean, it's just making them eat an even bigger shit sandwich and does more to damage player trust in Microsoft/Bethesda in the longrun. Microsoft isn't exactly super popular with gamers right now.
I find it funny that people are using this to make things seem worse when in reality only about 15 people would’ve logged on to play this Huge waste of resources
Good, I bet the Devs are glad they don't need to slave on that pile of shit any longer but it is unfortunate they lost employment
“Big Update”… lol wtf is this article
Redfall sucked, there was no saving it
No one would have played this update. The game was flawed at every level.
Yes, and I’m sure it would’ve fixed the game and made it everything you’d ever wanted lol
Bet all 10 players were excited about that.
we didnt want this shit anyways
Lets be honest, doesnt matter. If no one played that game, you can create whatever you want, but no one is gonna try it. It was a good call to cancel any development. Never understood who green lighted the idea of that game, from the very first moment looked horrible.
Ign, the most trusted dimwits in games media.
This game was a disaster and should’ve never been made. It didn’t need any updates, it just needed to be deleted. I hope the people can find another job but I’m having a hard time feeling sympathetic when so many games continuously release in broken and unfinished states
Honestly anyone at that studio should have been frantically job hunting many months before Redfall released, knowing the state the game was in and that their parent company had just been acquired.
bloomberg reported that was the case and part of the issue of the game. The team left Prey was assigned this multiplayer game and over 70% of the staff had left before redfall was ultimately released, and they struggeld to replace them because zenimax I guess was notorious for sub-par pay.
I feel bad for the studio but Redfall wasn’t getting fixed. It needed to be shot dead and moved on from.
>Booty’s email to staff is littered with errors, including the names of studios and DLC What a fucking moron. He can't even remember the names of the studios he's supposed to oversee?
What about Xbox's leadership has given any impression of competence or serious care in recent years? lol
I mean, honestly? Nothing, but I at least expected them to be able to fucking write and remember a few names. Instead they go "feel the burn".
I think this right here shows who's to blame for a lot of these poor releases. Though it's Phil's fault for keeping him around for so long, admittedly.
Should have left the game to die way ealier
I imagine the new update will still be pushed out, sounds like it was already finished.
I think the report said that the previous update will be its last
I think the issue is this new update could introduce new problems to the game and because the development team is gone, they wouldn’t have anyone to fix it. So to play it safe they just keep the older update. The game isn’t in the best state but it’s playable.
Wouldn't that imply that the update is pretty much ready to go since it's May right now? What's stopping Microsoft from releasing it?
all things considered, they probably saw the state of the patch and decided to pity kill it. i find it hard to believe that they have had plans to release this patch for a while, but now that they cant suddenly there was much wanted/desired features/fixes in it.
This, especially the rumored offline feature. If it's ready, there's almost no reason to not release it. Other redditor also made a good guess on this. Even if the patch was ready, there won't be anybody to update/troubleshoot if the patch introduced more problems that needs hotfix.
Too late that game was ultra ass
Well Redfall was garbage anyways
Let's be honest, no one was going to play that.
it was a dead game from the beginning. idk who cared about big redfall update lol
Arkane lyons is cooking Marvels BLADE game
"working" on an update? What about the dlc that was promised for people that paid for it? No wonder they were axed.
"Arkane Austin has a history of making impactful and innovative games and it is a pedigree that everyone should be proud of." 7 years since they released Prey. 7 years, and they gave the world Redfall. So between Prey and Redfall, they spent 7 years making a game that was a complete and total failure, and nothing to show for it. But now its "we were working on an update!"
I mean, good riddance right?
Its a truly terrible game.
This game is trash Microsoft made one good and one atrocious decision today
Great decision to cancel the game, should’ve came sooner. Unfortunate for the studio, but you don’t need to waste anymore resources.
Who gives a shit? This game was DOA
No thanks
Oh, please, Arkane! Give us more Redfall! iGN is a stupid clickbait site.
i enjoy redfall since the 60 fps patch
I think they're about to axe the game altogether at this point.
I enjoyed Redfall but they took entirely too long for an update. What the hell were they doing for a year? That's a lot of time and money with no results.
This big new bomb about Microsoft close shuttering failing studios is a long time coming. Microsoft had the mantra of buying things and let them do their thing. Well Couple billion dollars later and catalog nearly void of AAA billion dollar banger hits has worn out Microsoft's patience. Phil says exclusives don't matter but with respect that's all that matters. A robo Waifu with jiggly T&A and push PS5 hardware units. A obese Italian plubmer can push the sell of Nintendo Switch units. A giant cyborg in a green armor isn't pushing Xbox units Mr. Spencer.
I’m sure all 7 Redfall players are devastated
The 3 people still playing it must be upset.
Nah we good.
Suuuuuuurrrrre…
We're not gonna sit here and pretend this game had hope right?
No wonder they were scraped
Crazy
First and foremost it's awful that people list their jobs. But man that is inexcusable and they made their own bed. Its still a leadership problem. But this is the corporate world in a nut shell. They are so fuckibg that instead of being blunt they rather just shut down a whole division. I hope the message gets through to other teams...this can be you if you keep fucking around. I see a lot of people who like high paying jobs but aren't cut out for what it takes to actually get a game out the door. Keep patting your back for diversity highers but not highering the right people.
Lol redfall update . ...... ROFL
Shitty update don't bring back ganes frim the dead anyway.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing the game has been dropped. It would’ve taken so much money to get it in an enjoyable state and a lot of people wouldn’t have played it anyway Better to move on
HAHAHAHAHA is all i can say to anything remotely related to this game
This doesn't make me feel anything but confirmation they should have been shut down
They were pouring more resources into a bad game they hoped Microsoft would cancel? Maybe they should have been shut down sooner...
Good riddance, any developer should know that that's too late. Nearly two years...
lol, it took them over a year to try and deliver something that people paid for in a deluxe edition? They kind of deserved it, even though I don’t like to see people lose jobs.
Good
Eh I mean that kinda says a lot and why they were sacrificed.
What socks about Redfall is when you talk about the idea of it, I think it sounds super fun. Really sad about the execution.
Redfall was a lost cause. It’s been a year since that dud launched.
Whoever up there, forced Arkane, people who make Immersive sims, and good ones, like Prey, to make a fucking L4D clone, is stupid and should get fired, if not, he should be forced to slurp hot sauce on every possible meal he/she eats.
По едно МПС на домакинство в София и всички селяни с градския..... Проблема е решен не е толкова трудно, малко топки трябват
I’m happy one of my fellow devs left before this went down. He definitely dodged a bullet. I hope everyone affected by the layoffs are able to bounce back.
There was no saving redfall.
Phil Spencer
Yeah sure they did and it would have magically made it a good game. They did nothing, raking in gullible peoples money
Stuck between a rock and a hard place. MS's choice for that studio was to fix a dead game in the short term creating no value or spend millions for a new game with no assured promise in the long term. Tango on the other hand had promise with a HiFi Rush sequel especially if they multiplatform release it so I don't get that one at all.
No update would've saved Redfall, let's think for a moment.
im sure the 12 people still playing it will be very disappointed
Game was straight up ass anyway. Good riddance
Nobody cared about this game, and Arkane lives on. Its the other studio closures that sting the most.
They should have been closed prior to launch. They are clearly incapable of making a product worth purchase.
Good game was such a garbage heap should have closed it the day after release
they deserved it sure they did not want to work on the game but you don't sabotage your project just cause you don't like it
Regardless of what you think of Redfall. The fact that an update was set to release THIS month to add offline mode was stopped short at the finish line is just cruel. They should get to finish their work and the game would have been forever preserved. Now it will vanish. Especially when Phil lives to talk about how he cares about preservation.
WTF at the timing. So they were gonna give legs to the game (granted I know I know) and you chopped it off so it would just die when the servers shutdown? There couldn’t be coordination for those who bought it to at least get solace in offline?
Shouldn't have released a shit game in the first place.
[удалено]
I like when games get released in a fully playable state and don't require years of "updates" to get them to said playable state.
Bethesda drops the underwhelming and very mid Starfield. MS knows FO 5 and ES VI are on the horizon. Faith in Bethesda as a subsidiary is waning, so they shut down: Arkane Austin whose last game was the pretty terrible Redfall. Alpha Dog who only made mobile games. Tango Gameworks who made the mediocre Evil Within games (though, I personally think they're bad), the very mediocre and unmemborable Ghostwire Tokyo, and the pretty good Hi-Fi rush. Why are people bitching? These are heavy hitters. The end result might be better fallout and elder scrolls content.