Arkane Founder Slams Microsoft for Closing the Austin Studio, Explains Why Immersive Sims Aren’t Mainstream

Arkane Studios founder Raphaël Colantonio was recently interviewed by PC Gamer and had the chance to share his own thoughts on a couple of topics, starting with the closure of the Austin office.

As you’ll most certainly remember, Microsoft decided to shut down the studio’s US branch (alongside Tango Gameworks) earlier this year, largely due to the failure of Redfall. Unsurprisingly, Colantonio wasn’t a fan of the choice, calling it ‘stupid’:

I think if you look a little bit, it’s obvious that Arkane Austin was a very special group of people that have made some cool things and that could pull it off again. I think it was a decision that just came down to, ‘We need to cut something.’ Was it to please the investors, the stock market? They’re playing a different game. The rules that they play, we might not understand them. It’s a different thing. It’s hard to know why they did what they did. The only thing that I stand by is saying that the specific choice of killing Arkane Austin, that was not a good decision.

Recreating a very special group like that is, I would dare to say, impossible. It takes forever. When you have that magic of Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare etc that all come together, it’s a specific moment in time and space that just worked out this way, that took forever to reach. Those people together can really make magic. It’s not like, ‘Doesn’t matter, we’ll just rehire.’ No, try it. That’s what big groups do all the time. They try to just hire massively and overpay people to create those magic groups. It doesn’t work like this. So to me, that was stupid. But what do I know?

As a reminder, Colantonio left Arkane over seven years ago…