It’s been over a year since Arkane Austin, the Texas-based developer of Prey and Redfall, was shut down as Microsoft sought to prioritize “high-impact” games. The team was being led by Harvey Smith, known for his work on genre-defining games like Deus Ex and Dishonored, who took some time to reflect on the studio’s closure on the latest episode of My Perfect Console.
Smith’s episode of the interview podcast is two hours long and goes over his storied, three-decade career, but it begins with him and host Simon Parkin talking about one of the low points. Smith said he got a call the night before the fateful May 2024 day when Microsoft would shut down Arkane’s Austin studio informing him of the impending event, and spent the “stressful” night worrying about the Arkane developers who were still fairly new to the industry and had really only worked on a project or two before joining the studio to work on Redfall. He was also surprised the measure was being taken, he said, because Arkane had done “really good work.”
“Every company makes the decisions they make for the reason they make them,” Smith said. “I don’t agree with them often, but the main shock there was this studio made Dishonored, along with the Lyon studio, and then they made Prey. Then we were working on Redfall during the pandemic and everything else. The industry [was] exploring games-as-a-service games. It is what it is. Creative efforts are unpredictable.”
Smith says he takes responsibility for the traps Redfall fell into as the studio director, but acknowledges that he is “privileged” in the grand scheme of things because he has had a long career to look back on with highs and lows, whereas some of the Arkane Austin team was just getting started in their game dev careers when the shutdown happened, or had only worked with the team on one project. He goes on to talk about how long résumés in games are becoming more and more rare, and says that his experience of a career filled with both good and bad moments is much harder to come by.
“I’m that rare person who has no complaints, but that’s a little bit of survivorship bias because things have worked out for me,” Smith said. “Even when they haven’t, I can look on a long track now and be like ‘Yes, there was a low point here, but look at this high point over here. This is incredible.’
“If you have that luxury to look back on a bunch of highs and lows, it contextualizes things.”
One time when I was getting laid off from a previous job, the HR guy tried to tell me and other affected workers that this was just a bump in the road, and that the average person has several jobs over the course of their lifetime, as if that was a comfort. However, as Smith illustrates here, there was a time when that was true, when a layoff from one job was probably not a disaster as you could likely find another one in a reasonable amount of time. In video games, that has never been less true than it is right now. Layoffs are at an all-time high and are affecting even the most profitable companies in the space. Something like Arkane Austin’s closure might not emotionally affect a veteran the same way it will someone who felt like they’d finally “made it” by landing a job at the company that made Dishonored. Redfall was not the next live-service hit everyone involved was probably hoping for, but it’s still a shame that a studio of such pedigree was caught up in the live-service rat race and shuttered after it didn’t work out.
