Dishonored co-creator reflects on 'shock' Microsoft decision to shutter Arkane Austin
The co-creator of Dishonored and the longtime studio director of Arkane Austin, Harvey Smith, recently opened up about the “shock” of Microsoft shuttering the studio in May 2024, following the negative reception of its vampiric FPS, Redfall.
Smith spoke to host Simon Parkin in the latest episode of the My Perfect Console podcast and looked back on the team’s history, alongside the experience behind developing the 2012 stealth-action FPS Dishonored and crafting the acclaimed but seemingly forgotten 2017 Prey.
He later delved into the pain of closing down the studio. Smith received a call the night before the official announcement, which left him up all night, unable to sleep, thinking about the younger devs who debuted their work via Redfall.
Smith explained in the interview:
“It was a shock, because we had done really good work, and this is a group of people in some cases, who had worked together for one project and in other cases, like me and Ricardo Bare (creative lead behind Prey: Mooncrash), had worked together since the late nineties.”
Smith took the blame for Redfall’s commercial failure, deeming it a live-service experiment that fell flat amid the pandemic. He further said:
Who I really felt for were the new people, like, this was their first project, or they’d only been Rin the industry for a bit of while… Mostly it was a shock, and it was trying to help, especially the people that, for whom this was just a mind-blowing experience.
Despite the unexpected setback, Smith kept his head down to work and roll out Redfall’s 1.4 patch, which he called “a huge full-court press inside the company.” The patch introduced offline mode, overhauled systems, and fine-tuned the game to something closer to Arkane’s vision.
Smith was glad that Microsoft allowed them to push that one final update, stating, “Microsoft allowed us to finish 1.4 with a lot of campaigning going for it. And as a result, the team’s work wasn’t wasted, and the game that sits up there today is much better than the one that we released at launch.”
However, he further stated:
It was not a decision I agreed with. I did believe very much in the studio's future. We were working on something very cool.” He also revealed that the studio was working on a Blade Runner game, and said, “We were working on a Blade Runner game, which was super exciting to me. What we could have done with Blade Runner…
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