The gaming world is still reeling from the announcement that Microsoft is shuttering Tango Gameworks, the studio behind last year’s big Xbox hit, Hi-Fi Rush, which wont multiple awards, was one of the best-reviewed games of the year and beloved by fans.
Everyone has been asking “Why? Why do this?” and now we have at least one executive trying, and failing, to answer that question.
That would be, unfortunately for her, Sarah Bond, the President of Xbox, who was asked the question at a Bloomberg Tech event this week. Her answer has gone viral, or rather non-answer, as she offers no real explanation and rambles in corporate/PR speak without saying anything at all. It’s such a poor answer with apparently zero prep on Microsoft’s end it’s almost unbelievable. You can watch it below, but this thing needs to be transcribed, which I’ll do below it:
“You know, one of the things I really…love about the games industry is it’s a creative art form, and it means that…the…situation and what success is for each game and studio is really unique. There’s no one size fits all to it for us. Um…and so…we look at each studio, each game team and we look at a full variety of factors when we’re faced with making decisions and tradeoffs like that but uh, it all comes back to our long-term commitment to the games we create, the devices we build, the services, and make sure we’re setting ourselves up to make sure we’re able to deliver on those promises.”
Just, wow. Bond looked incredibly uncomfortable giving this answer, understandably, and I am going to try to extract some semblance of from this:
- “The…situation and what success is for each game and studio is really unique.” – This seems to imply that Microsoft views Hi-Fi Rush as a failure on some sort of unexplained level, despite claiming it was an unqualified success after its stealth launch and widespread positive reception.
- “We look at each studio, each game team and we look at a full variety of factors when we’re faced with making decisions and tradeoffs like that.” – This goes into the idea that Microsoft is refocusing on its larger IPs and there will likely be less room for smaller games, even acclaimed ones from talented teams, and they cut Tango because they were years away from a new game still. Those are behind the scenes reports, but could be what Bond is alluding to here. Calling the shutdown a “tradeoff” is still absurd though, what are getting in this trade, exactly?
- “It all comes back to our long-term commitment to the games we create, the devices we build, the services, and make sure we’re setting ourselves up to make sure we’re able to deliver on those promises.” – Just pure corpo speak at this point. Some sort of generic sentiment about how their a business and they have to do business-y things like shutdowns and layoffs to keep functioning as a business. Cool, great.
There is still no explanation of why Tango, why the Hi-Fi Rush studio specifically. Why with all the money Microsoft has would they not choose to further invest into the place that gave them arguably the best exclusive of the entire current Xbox generation. I suppose I understand why they wouldn’t say their reason outright because I doubt it would be remotely satisfying and probably only make them look worse, but saying what Bond said here is almost more insulting. And Tango is indeed insulted. Here is Kazuaki Egashi, Game Project Manager at Tango posting a shot of the game’s BAFTA and Game Award and other prizes. “Not enough?” he says:
No, I guess not.
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