[swaginator]

I imagine that the closing of Arkane studios Austin was a big motivator for worker's to unionize. They created successful games and Microsoft shut them down for pretty much no reason. I am kinda on the periphery of the gaming scene in Austin and that was a huge deal when it happened.

[gruez]

>I imagine that the closing of Arkane studios Austin was a big motivator for worker's to unionize. They created successful games and Microsoft shut them down for pretty much no reason.

And how would it be different with a union? Hold a strike to force the company to keep the studio open?

[cen4]

Its a messy process cause no one has/gets time to come up with something more imaginative (ironic I know cause this is supposed to be a creative class).

Thanks to globalization, ever changing regional differences in interest rates, corporate taxes, forex, labor costs, real estate prices, govt freebies/subsidies/laws etc etc, companies make decisions that have nothing to do with product produced yday or its quality.

In corporate wonderland, execs aren't trained (or given the time and resources) to use their imagination or think too deeply about how to respond to All these external forces. They are expected to avoid complex or unpredictable solutions and React as quickly as possible before the competition takes advantage of the external changes. Its automatic and highly predictable behavior how execs will respond.

The only way to slow the instant (bordering on mindless) reactions down, is to add Delay. Which buys people time on both sides of the equation to think. Now obviously its hit or miss whether any thinking happens and creative solutions are found. But its a starting point in having some sort of say in a process people on all sides have lost control over, due to global not local changes.

[swaginator]

If one studio closes you can imagine the screws are tightening at the others. Unionization arguably wouldn't help for studios closing, but it would help push back against crunch and other labor abuses.

[wlesieutre]

IIRC previous Arkane Austin titles are Dishonored 2 and Prey which were great games, but Redfall was definitely not so well received. I wouldn’t necessarily agree they were closed for “pretty much no reason,” but should one big flop mean a studio gets the axe?

With how expensive AAA development has gotten maybe that’s the stakes now, and a reason so many are taking the modern Hollywood playbook of churning out sequels and remasters.

The really egregious “no reason” closure was Tango Gameworks, makers of Hi-Fi Rush.

[swaginator]

> With how expensive AAA development has gotten maybe that’s the stakes now, and a reason so many are taking the modern Hollywood playbook of churning out sequels and remasters.

The studio was owned by M$ though. There's no reason they couldn't have kept all those people in-house and just moved them on to some game with a tried and true IP attached to it.