They had so many ideas and concepts that, under better leadership, they might have been able to bring them to life.

Arkane Austin is far from the only studio Microsoft has shut down in pursuit of maintaining a 30% profit margin year after year. While Redfall was not the studio’s strongest release, its earlier projects include the critically acclaimed immersive sim Dishonored from 2012 and Prey from 2017, often regarded as a spiritual successor to System Shock. Despite this legacy, Arkane Austin’s story came to an end just over a year after Redfall launched.

Former studio director Harvey Smith recently reflected on these events and their impact on the team. Discussions about studio closures rarely focus on the loss of institutional knowledge, but Smith said he was most distressed by what the shutdown meant for the younger developers. He explained that it took time to process the situation, partly because he was still working on post-launch updates for Redfall to ensure the game ended its life cycle in the best possible state.

“I got a call the night before and spent a very stressful night thinking about it. Every company makes decisions for its own reasons, and I often disagree with them. It was a shock, because we had done really good work. This was a group of people who, in some cases, had worked together on the same project, and in other cases – like me and Ricardo Bare, the creative lead of Prey: Mooncrash – had been working together since the late ’90s. The people I felt for the most were the newcomers. For some, this was their first project or they had only been in the industry a short time. It was mostly shock, and I tried to help, especially those for whom this was just unbelievable. I kept my head down for a while, dealt with it, and only after a couple of months did I stop and take a breath.”

Smith expressed gratitude toward Microsoft for allowing Arkane to complete the Redfall 1.4 update. As a result, the team’s work was not lost, and the current version of the game is significantly improved compared to its launch state.

As previously reported, Arkane Austin worked on a Blade Runner game before developing Dishonored. Smith also briefly mentioned several other unfinished projects the studio had explored over the years, reiterating that Arkane was once working on a Thief game before Eidos reclaimed control of the license.

The closure of Arkane Austin marked what many see as the end of the immersive sim renaissance of the 2010s, an era that gave us the Deus Ex sequels from Eidos Montréal and Arkane’s own defining works.

Source: PCGamer, Acast