Microsoft closing Arkane Austin was a ‘dumb move’, says founder and former president

WolfEye Studios boss and Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio understandably remains frustrated by Microsoft’s decision to kill off Arkane Austin earlier this year. Colantonio started Arkane back in 1999, which grew into two studios, Arkane Lyon and Arkane Austin, in 2006. His last game, before departing the company in 2017, was the whip-smart, extremely paranoid sci-fi romp Prey.

The Austin team would only produce one more game, the unsuccessful Redfall, before its new owner, Microsoft, closed its doors. Jeremy Peel recently caught up with Colantonio for a wide-ranging interview—which you can read more of over the next week—and one of the biggest disappointments for him was how Microsoft broke up so much talent.

“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,” he says. “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.”

Since Colantonio left Arkane before the closure, he doesn’t know why Microsoft cut the cord. “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.” But he’s adamant that it was the wrong thing to do. “The only thing that I stand by is saying that the specific choice of killing Arkane Austin, that was not a good decision.”

Unfortunately, he doesn’t think we’ll get a studio like it again. “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?”

Arkane Lyon is still around, at least, and is currently tinkering away on its next game: Marvel’s Blade. Colantonio, meanwhile, continues to make fascinating immersive sims, like Weird West. WolfeEye’s next project is a first-person action-RPG.