Summary
I have a confession to make, one as embarrassing as it is alienating. Welive in an era of job cuts and cancellations in video games, but I see a lot of them and shrug. See, the thing is, is it really sad that a studio is laying off a hundred people who were making a soulless, battle pass-stuffed live-service game? Is it not just sadder that the studio was making this game in the first place?
Obviously,many would point at the human cost of these layoffs, and they’re correct to do so. That is what makes this an embarrassing confession. But when layoffs happen every week, how do you not become numb to it? If I allowed myself to be concerned every time strangers were fired I’d never know a moment’s peace. There are more academic concerns to this issue - the brain drain that will stunt development of new ideas, the creativity being stalled by constant retooling, the dog eat dog environment that makes these failing battle pass games more likely to be pitched because they make profit over time… but even as I say these sentences, it all sounds so dull and corporate. I say the right things about how much it sucks, but do I actually care? AfterXbox’slatest move, I think I finally do.
Xbox’s Layoffs Are One Step Too Far
The chief victims of the layoffs are studiosunder theBethesdaumbrella (which itself sits under the Xbox umbrella) are Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, which represent different sides of the modern game development coin. Arkane Austin just madeRedfall, a very bad video game unworthy of Arkane’s legacy and too caught up in the live-service philosophy to stand on its own two feet.
Making a bad video game doesn’t mean you deserve to get your job taken away, especially when many of the bad decisions weremade by or made to appease the corporate overlords who are typically immune to these layoffs. Maybe my lack of sympathy is part of the problem too - the developers are treated as cannon fodder, as fat to be trimmed when profits don’t match projections. Executives, on the other hand, are people. They are seen as individuals with specific value, not just monkeys writing code who can be replaced with other monkeys once code needs to be written again.
It’s sad to see Arkane Austin end like this afterPrey. But it’s not that unusual. The studio made a bad game (notan okay game that didn’t match expectations, likeStarfield, buta truly terrible, near irredeemable game), and in this business, it’s one miss and you’re out. Again, on an academic level, I think that’s a bad way to operate. It will lead to worse, staler games. But on a human level, I’m not usually that sad when these studios get shut down because mostly I think we should make less of these games, and I hope that maybe this time the message will stick.
I feel bad for feeling this way, but that doesn’t change the fact that I do. Of course I’m outraged at how disposable devs are treated, at the exorbitant salaries of executives, by how huge the numbers for these layoffs are every time we hear about them. But sad? Angry? Not really. These are expected turns of events. I thought Arkane’s name might have protected it for at least one more go around, but as soon as Redfall flopped, I knew that job losses would follow soon enough.
Hi-Fi Rush Proves Gaming Layoffs Make No Sense
It’s Tango Gameworks that has made me stop in my tracks. I don’t even loveHi-Fi Rushthe way a lot of staff at TheGamer do, but I still see it is an excellent game with an original point of view and fantastic artwork and gameplay, wrapped up in a neat, rhythmic package. It was shadowdropped and became one of the breakout hits of 2023,that year to end all years. Free on Game Pass,various Xbox suits defended its figures at launch; it was a game thatwould not be measured in dollars or copies but in what it meant for Xbox.
I believed them. Hi-Fi Rush seemed like part of a new era for Xbox, one where it stopped falling short of PlayStation with poor imitations and came up with original ways to beat it. Hi-Fi Rush was the future. It was bold. It was bright. It was original. It was Xbox. It did everything it could have possibly done to represent the Xbox name and did it with style. It was not the haggard zombie of a live-service age slowly dying, but a dawn of something new. AndMicrosoftkilled it anyway.
There was always a little bit of superiority in my shrugging. An arrogant sense that I was not so optimistic or naive to be blindsided by layoffs. But in the wake of Hi-Fi Rush, I see how foolish I was. There’s no misstep you can trace in Hi-Fi Rush’s development, no error of judgement to be cruelly punished. This is not a studio that overreached or chased trends or played it safe. Tango represents the flower that can grow in the compost of the modern gaming industry, and it has been trampled without cause.
What is the point of all this? At least there was something of a decisive executive outlook in the other executions. When games that didn’t become the nextFortnitewere killed off, there was at least a lesson in ‘don’t try to be Fortnite’. What do you learn from Hi-Fi Rush? Stop making original things, but also, as the other layoffs teach us, stop chasing trends. So, do nothing? Get lucky? Know that no matter what you do you’ll be out of a job in a year? My lesson is to stop shrugging and taking these layoffs for granted. If they can happen to Hi-Fi Rush, they can happen to anyone. And if they can happen to anyone, they shouldn’t be happening at all.
Hi-Fi Rush
WHERE TO PLAY
Hi-Fi Rush, from Ghostwire: Tokyo developers Tango Gameworks, is a 2023 action game that focuses on rhythm as a core gameplay mechanic. As Chai, you must take on the nefarious megacorp that created your cybernetic arm.
