Over a year after the studio behind Prey, Arkane Austin, was shut down after the commercial and critical failure of co-op shooter Redfall, former studio director Harvey Smith has spoken about his time in the industry, as well as the studio’s closure. In an interview with My Perfect Console, Smith spoke about how surprised he was when he was informed of the studio being shut down by Microsoft the night before it happened in May 2024, especially since he thought that Arkane Austin had done “really good work”.
While he noted that companies often tend to make decisions that are disagreed upon by those working under these decisions, he was especially surprised at the closure of Arkane Austin, since it had worked on critically-acclaimed titles like Dishonored alongside Arkane Lyon, as well as Prey.
“Every company makes the decisions they make for the reason they make them,” Smith said. “I don’t agree with them often, but the main shock there was this studio made Dishonored, along with the Lyon studio, and then they made Prey. Then we were working on Redfall during the pandemic and everything else. The industry [was] exploring games-as-a-service games. It is what it is. Creative efforts are unpredictable.”
As for the game that likely played a major role in the studio’s closure—Redfall—Smith spoke about being in a privileged position that has allowed him to have a long and storied career in the gaming industry. He also took personal responsibility for some of the issues that Arkane Austin faced during the development of Redfall. When it comes to his own privilege, he also spoke about how the industry has been losing many veterans that have decided to move on from gaming, with resumes becoming shorter and shorter. Arkane Austin itself, he noted, had team members that had just kicked off their game industry careers.
“I’m that rare person who has no complaints, but that’s a little bit of survivorship bias because things have worked out for me,” he said. “Even when they haven’t, I can look on a long track now and be like ‘Yes, there was a low point here, but look at this high point over here. This is incredible.’ If you have that luxury to look back on a bunch of highs and lows, it contextualizes things.”
The closure of Arkane Austin, as well as other studios under the Xbox Game Studios banner including Tango Gameworks, came as quite a surprise when it happened back in May 2024. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer had referred to the closure of these studios as “hard decisions” that were made for the sake of “sustainable business”.
“In the end, I’ve said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make,” he said back in June 2024. “We will continue to go forward. We will continue to invest in what we’re trying to go do in Xbox and build the best business we can, which ensures we can continue to do shows like the one we just did.”
