The Closure of Tango Gameworks 8 May, 2024

Please note that this was written on May 2024, a few months before Tango Gameworks was reacquired by Krafton.

In early 2023, I felt like gaming wasn’t fun anymore. I knew it was a common fatigue though, and that there’ll be a game that I’ll play soon that would inject that fun and soul only the medium could provide. That happened when Hi-Fi Rush shadow dropped in January 2023. With its gorgeous Futurama-esque aesthetics and comedic tone and excellent reviews, I bought it and fell in love immediately. The catharsis of the character action and rhythm genres, joined at last in spectacular fashion. It cured my fatigue. In 2023, despite sharing my time with work, photography, and vacations with my family, I completed an 70 video games thanks to my renewed love of gaming attributed to Hi-Fi Rush (not to mention that 2023 was a great year for gaming in general).

It was developed by Tango Gameworks, a studio owned by Zenimax, who are owned by Bethesda… and would be further owned by Microsoft in 2020, in their effort to seemingly monopolize the AAA industry. Bethesda, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Arkane Studios and - after a long litigable battle - Activision-Blizzard, plus all their subsidiaries, all distinguishable studios now under the mercy of Redmond. And mercy did they not show.

On the 7 May, Microsoft announced that as part of a corporate restructuring, Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks would be shut down. Arkane Austin’s closure was understandable - Redfall was a commercial and critical failure. But Tango Gameworks’s Hi-Fi Rush was the complete opposite: it was the embodiment of video game design and essence, and my personal GOTY.

So why did they punish such a talented studio? Did they lie about the game’s success and investing into Tango? Did Xbox Game Pass, which Microsoft has been vigorously promoting as their trump card, screw their own game over?

Earlier this year, Amazon released the Fallout television series to massive commercial success. A feat that joins the recent list of successful video game adaptations - HBO’s The Last of Us, Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog and Sony’s Gran Turismo (you could also count Netflix’s The Witcher and Cyberpunk Edgerunners, although those were originally adaptations of non-videogame media). And, with upcoming film adaptations of The Legend of Zelda and Borderlands, we might be living in an unprecedented era where successful video game adaptations are being released at steady pace, potentially out-profiting the infamously overinflated video game industry.

The theory is that since Microsoft owns the Fallout IP, they want to capitalize on its success by shifting Bethesda’s focus so they work more on Fallout their other premier IPs, leaving the likes of Arkane and Tango to the side. Does this mean that Amazon indirectly kill Tango Gameworks? Probably not. But if the shift within the gaming industry of constant layoffs and terminations can punish a labor of love like Hi-Fi Rush (not to mention Tango’s generally well-received The Evil Within series) to the point where the entire studio and its talent is terminated, then I can’t help but feel like the gaming industry is in serious trouble.

The fatigue is back. I won’t be gaming for a while.