Arkane Studios’ Harvey Smith has reflected on Microsoft’s closure of the studio last year, describing it as “a shock” after its run of successes.
Smith was lead game designer on the original Deus Ex in 2000, before eventually joining Arkane in 2008. After working as co-creative director on Dishonored, he worked on its sequel, Prey, and the studio’s final, ill-fated live-service game Redfall. The studio was shut down by Microsoft in May last year, following the poor sales of Redfall.
“Every company makes the decisions they make for the reason they make them,” said Smith on the My Perfect Console podcast. “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 for a number of years during the pandemic and everything else. The industry exploring games-as-a-service games… It is what it is. Creative efforts are unpredictable.”
He continued: “It was a shock at first, but who I really felt for were the people who were new, this was their first project or they’d only been in the industry for a while.”
Smith admitted his own privilege with the situation considering his years of experience and the ups and downs he’s worked through, but lamented the loss of junior staff through studio closures and layoffs for whom developing the game was a “mind-blowing experience”.
“It was a shock,” he said. “It was not a decision I agreed with. I did believe very much in the future of the studio, we were working on something super cool.”
At least, the studio was able to release its 1.4 update to Redfall after the announcement of its closure, what Smith described as a “huge upgrade to the game”. “If we had launched with that and then built from there it might have been a different story,” he said, adding the update allowed the team to get “as close as we could” to the vision of the game.
Smith also discussed the difficulties of receiving feedback from players online, which perhaps led to the downfall of Redfall and the studio – particularly the “vitriol” on social media.
“I feel like video game developers get it worse,” he said, comparing the reaction to games to that of artists or musicians. “You release your game, it took years to get there, maybe it flops, maybe it does ok, maybe people hate it. Even if they love it, there’s a social media caustic, acidic vitriol that gets thrown at you. And every time you ship a game there’s always going to be that, every time there’s that vitriol no matter what you do. Then you hope that the number of people who love it swamp that, overwhelm it.”
Before Dishonored, Smith said he worked on a couple of games at Arkane that never saw the light of day. One of those was a Blade Runner game, which certainly would’ve suited him well after Deus Ex.
“We were working for a while on a Blade Runner game, which was super exciting to me. What we could have done with Blade Runner…,” he said, before tailing off. Alas, perhaps we’ll never know.
After Redfall’s release, Microsoft Gaming boss Phil Spencer apologised for its disastrous launch. “We let a lot of people down this week,” he said.
“Arkane’s vampire thriller is muddled and deeply compromised, but has moments of real charm,” reads our Redfall review.
