As in all things in life, “balance” can be a pain in the butt as much as it is “natural.” If you’re a fan of Nintendo or Sony, things have been good in the last few days via the former’s financial results that showcase how good the company is doing, or in the case of the latter, the backtracking they did with a certain popular from “Super Earth.” However, with Microsoft, things have not been the best. Today, the publisher announced the closing of several studios, and that led the boss of Arkane Lyon, Dinga Bakaba, to openly blast Microsoft for doing terrible practices and shutting down studios at the first sign of trouble.
If you’re unaware, Bakaba and Arkane Lyon are the team behind great titles like Deathloop and are the ones making the upcoming Blade title that many are excited about. Arkane Austin was the team that got shut down today, and they were the ones behind the maligned game Redfall.
After hearing what happened to his brethren from Arkane, Dinga went onto his Twitter handle and made a series of statements about the situation, and it was clear he wasn’t happy:
Oh, he didn’t stop there. Dinga, not unlike a certain Larian Studios boss before him, called out in a thread the terrible practices that companies like Microsoft use to try and get profits in the gaming industry:
“Don’t throw us into gold fever gambits, don’t use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don’t make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.”
He also asked the community to be kind and respectful to those who lost their jobs today and not to use the dreaded “immersive sim curse” statement to explain why things are going wrong. He emphatically asked for that last one.
While Microsoft might not be happy with his vocal thread on Twitter, he spoke no lies. Microsoft and Sony have both had massive layoffs in the past four months because they have overestimated certain things and didn’t get the results they “hoped for.”
It’s also been documented that when Microsoft bought Bethesda, and got Arkane as a “bonus,” the team behind Redfall hoped that the publisher would see that the game wasn’t going well development-wise and either allow them to change it or nix it entirely so they could do a title that was “more on their level.” Instead, Microsoft “trusted them,” the game had a failed launch, and now the studio is closing.
Things need to change in the industry, or more closings like these will happen.
