A surprising new detail has emerged in regards to the closure of Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks.
When Microsoft announced the studio’s closure, a lot of fans argued that the company had crippled themselves in Japan by doing so. Xbox has notoriously never gained a foothold in the country, but having a studio based in Japan would have helped them get halfway there. But it turns out, that logic was out of touch with the real situation.
As we had just reported, Microsoft is rumored to have spun off a new studio from King’s developers, to make AA games of Activision and Blizzard IPs. Blizzard’s legacy was minted in the 1990s, and Activision has both a modern gaming legacy, and a history from the dawn of consoles, starting all the way back in 1979.
So there’s a lot of clear potential in making new smaller games from IPs like StarCraft and River Raid, to revive nostalgia for those brands, and also to help fill out Xbox’s notorious game lineup, with titles constantly receiving delays and players having to wait for their library to fill out.
Tango Gameworks may not have been owned by Activision Blizzard King, but they were clearly in this kind of position given their last release, Hi-Fi Rush. If the first two The Evil Within games and Ghostwire: Tokyo were not quite successful enough to justify the AAA budgets they were made on, Hi-Fi Rush seemed to be a reasonable path forward.
Microsoft has officially claimed in PR that they consider Hi-Fi Rush a success, though they have never shared the numbers for the title, or what goals they set out for it in public. But if we take this information at face value, clearly, this was the kind of game that they’re looking to make now.
Windows Central’s Jez Corden though the same thing, and he reached out to his sources on if Microsoft saw that too. To quote Jez verbatim:
“It’s a shame, because you might be wondering why Microsoft decided that closed Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks didn’t fit into this strategy. From what I’ve been told it did. It was sadly only for its geographical location in Japan, making inter-studio collaboration logistically difficult.”
If this is true, then it’s possible that Tango Gameworks was in a bad position regardless if Hi-Fi Rush was a financial success or not. Perhaps if there were real big numbers for this game, Microsoft could have found a buyer to take Tango independent, or bring it under another company, perhaps this time a Japanese owner like Konami or even Sony. Microsoft did claim that they sought out different ways to rescue the studios they closed, so this had to have been something they tried.
For fans who were seeking clarity on how this played out, we know that this isn’t what they wanted to hear. But it’s something that pushes back on a popular narrative, that we have to acknowledge wasn’t informed by what really happened behind the scenes at Zenimax or Microsoft. It certainly raises more questions too, but it’s important we at least acknowledge that this situation wasn’t what people thought it was at all.
