MS shuts down some companies

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, capitalism can be cruel sometimes. 

For Arkane Austin, I'm sure that somebody decided that rebuilding the studio after the disaster that was Redfall wasn't worth the cost, so they are shutting it down instead.  Apparently a lot of the good staff have left, so it's sadly somewhat expected -- one failure often takes out a studio now due to how much games cost to develop.  This is a shutdown directly connected to Bethesda's mismanagement.  But given how horrible a company Bethesda/ZeniMax were -- remember how they withheld payments to Human Head to try to force them to sell their company to them, did some really slimy stuff around the Fallout purchase, etc etc -- I think that there's no doubt who has the primary fault here, Bethesda.  It's too bad MS shut it down instead of rebuilding the studio though, sure.  But with most of the good staff gone, it's not the same studio...

For Tango it's a bit harder to understand, though I'd have to imagine that there was something going on behind the scenes, costs out of control or something?  Also its founder Shinji Mikami left last year, so it was a studio without its famous leader.  Their games weren't big hits (and I haven't played any of them, Hi-Fi Rush looked thematically very uninteresting to me with its music theme and all) but were popular with a hardcore audience, so shutting the studio has caused MS some very bad PR with core gamers.  It was also MS's only studio in Japan.  It'd be nice to know more of the reason for this closure -- did Hi-Fi Rush actually sell worse than MS suggested and they don't want to keep developing smaller games or something, was there internal problems at the studio after Mikami left, or what?

Overall though, it's not good to shut studios down, Nintendo's model is far better.  Still, I think some people are exaggerating how bad this is in order to make Microsoft look bad.  I'd guess a lot of those people are biased against Microsoft because they prefer Playstation...