While we may use the likes of Concord and Highguard as the biggest dead horses to beat when it comes to talking about failed live-service projects, hero shooters aren't the only expensive endeavours that cost a big buck. Redfall was a co-op live-service game, from a prestigious studio, that flopped hard enough to cause the unfortunate closure of Arkane Austin.
Speaking to The Game Business, Redfall director and Arkane veteran Harvey Smith spoke about the studio getting "swept up" in the idea of games-as-a-service. "[Redfall] was a difficult project. Arkane is very specialized, but the industry is growing, and there's always more mouths to feed. And it's great when you can reach a wider audience. We got swept up in the games-as-a-service thing, and I had the foolish chutzpah to assume that it always works out for us. We can do this. Let's take what we love, and mix it with [games-as-a-service]. And do different mechanics by day and night. And have character classes. Then in the middle of all that, COVID happened. We also had the great resignation where everybody went remote and started changing jobs," Smith said.
Smith takes some positive lessons from the experience. In the year following Redfall's release, Arkane Austin worked on thousands of bugs, and even released an update despite not working at Xbox anymore. "The experience we went through on that long, troubled project where I was clearly out of my lane, and I was not working on the things that I should be working on... Some of my proudest moments was watching the team rally around incredibly difficult things," Smith said.
Right now, Smith is working with long-time collaborator Ben Horne at a new studio, Black Pony Interactive. They'll be developing more of what they know, creating new single-player immersive sims, now having learned that games-as-a-service isn't in their wheelhouse.