Arkane Austin’s Closure Was “Not A Good Decision,” Per Former President

It’s been a rough year for video game studios, with layoffs and closures affecting almost everyone (Concord developer Firewalk Studios and Neon Koi being the most recent). Some of the biggest came from Microsoft, which has laid off about 2500 employees thus far and closed down studios like Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin.

While some pointed at the failure of Redfall as the reason for the latter’s closure, former Arkane president and founder Raphael Colantino still feels it was “not a good decision.”

“I think if you look a little bit, it’s obvious that Arkane Austin was a very special group that made some cool things and could pull it off again. I think it was a decision that came down to, ‘We need to cut something.’ Was it to please the investors, the stock market? They’re playing a different game,” said Colantino to PC Gamer.

Having left Arkane in 2017 and established WolfEye Studios, which released Weird West in 2022 (and is seemingly working on a new sci-fi RPG), Colantino says it’s “hard to know” why Microsoft shut down the studio. “The rules that they play, we might not understand them. It’s a different thing. It’s hard to know why they did what they did. The only thing that I stand by is saying that the specific choice of killing Arkane Austin was not a good decision.”

He also feels that recreating the studio’s magic will be impossible. “Recreating a very special group like that is, I would dare to say, impossible. It takes forever. When you have that magic of Harvey [Smith] and Ricardo [Bare] etc, that all come together, it’s a specific moment in time and space that just worked out this way, that took forever to reach. Those people together can really make magic.

“It’s not like, ‘Doesn’t matter, we’ll just rehire.’ No, try it. That’s what big groups do all the time. They try to just hire massively and overpay people to create those magic groups. It doesn’t work like this. So, to me, that was stupid. But what do I know?”

Though Arkane Austin is gone, Tango Gameworks was saved by Krafton, which acquired it and the Hi-Fi Rush IP from Microsoft. The publisher has since hyped Hi-Fi Rush 2 as somewhat of an open-world experience with more “dynamic” environments. Work paused on the sequel due to Tango’s closure, but it will resume “soon.” Stay tuned for updates in the meantime.