#276: I can feel another Rush coming on

Good news. Actual, honest-to-god good news. Heavens, it’s been a while.

Overnight Krafton, the Korean publisher best known for its stewardship of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, announced it is reviving Tango Gameworks, the Tokyo-based maker of Hi-Fi Rush, Ghostwire: Tokyo and The Evil Within that was so cruelly, stupidly and short-sightedly abandoned by Microsoft a few months ago. Krafton says it is working with Microsoft to “ensure a smooth transition and maintain continuity” at the studio; reading between the lines it appears a sequel to Hi-Fi Rush is the top priority, with ownership of the IP moving from Microsoft to Krafton as part of the deal. (The rights to The Evil Within and Ghostwire will remain with the Xbox maker.) While it’s unclear just how much of the Tango team is returning — the studio was officially closed a month ago, and one imagines a lucky few may have found jobs elsewhere in Japan’s comparatively healthy game industry — the offer at least appears to be there. John Johanas, director of Hi-Fi Rush, has confirmed he’ll be part of the new set-up.

I am truly, honestly delighted that I have so little to say about this. There isn’t much in the way of deeper subtext, or some wider theme in need of unpacking. This is just great news — something of which we have been rather starved over the last 18 months or so, and in 2024 in particular: over 11,000 jobs lost, studios shrunk and shuttered, a host of beloved games seemingly consigned to the scrapheap. Amidst it all, the Tango closure hit the hardest, the standard-bearer for all that is wrong with the videogame industry in Space Year 2024; a proven maker of high-quality, award-winning, widely loved games scattered to the winds, sacrificed at the altar of shareholder value by a parent company by which it did everything right, but for whom nothing is ever enough.

I certainly didn’t have ‘Krafton to the rescue’ on my 2024 bingo card, and we should probably take a minute to note the publisher’s rather chequered recent past. Just last week it announced it had hired as its new chief publishing officer Jin Oh, who was named in a lawsuit alleging gender-based discrimination at his previous employer, Riot Games, that ended in a $100m settlement. And Glen Schofield, director of the Krafton-published Dead Space tribute act The Callisto Protocol, last week hit out at the publisher for abruptly bringing forward the game’s release date, leading to cut content, a brutal final stretch and a lukewarm critical and commercial response that led to a few dozen layoffs at Schofield’s studio Striking Distance. Krafton is a public company; it is as ultimately beholden to its shareholders as all the others. It has done some grim shit in the past, and will probably do some more in the future.

So sure, perhaps Krafton is no angel. And let us not kid ourselves that this is anything other than a beautiful anomaly. The global game industry’s great downturn will continue; layoff announcements are like buses these days, and another one will surely be along in a moment. But it is okay to enjoy this, to forget about everything else for a moment and allow yourself to feel good about one small, specific thing. Tango is back, Hi-Fi Rush will return, a bunch of talented developers no longer have to worry about making next month’s rent, and the rest of us get to look at a news story and actually fucking smile for once. This is a precious, precious feeling. I suggest we all enjoy it while we can.

Hey, while we’re here, let’s catch up on last week’s news, since Hit Points was on holiday. Free readers, did you know you can get this nonsense in your inbox every Friday for just £4 ($5 / €4.50) a month? It’s true. You can.

MORE!

• While sunning itself on the English south coast last week, Hit Points shed a quiet tear for Game Informer, the legendary US magazine that was abruptly shuttered by owner Gamestop. During my time on Edge I naturally felt a certain kinship with the team over there, and my handful of encounters with them over the years revealed them to be a thoroughly decent bunch of people who deserved an awful lot better than the bland, anonymous announcement of the mag’s closure, the immediate deletion of its website, and the similarly abrupt closure of its Twitter account after a staffer who still had the keys tried to put a human spin on the news. While the closure of a magazine in 2024 can never honestly be called surprising — particularly for one owned by a brick-and-mortar retailer that’s been circling the drain for a decade — this is still a shock, and a great loss, not just for the media but the industry as a whole. You can call print dead all you want, but I promise you there are few greater buzzes for a game developer than seeing their work on a printed page. Very sad stuff.
• Meta is closing Ready At Dawn, the developer of PS4 exclusive The Order: 1886 that pivoted to VR so successfully that Facebook bought it in 2020. The studio hasn’t released a game since a 2020 port of Echo VR, so I suppose it was always going to be in the firing line when clammy replicant prototype Mark Zuckerberg finally realised his metaverse dream was dead. A sad end for a clearly very talented bunch.
• Warner Bros’ woes continued this week with news of a 41% drop in revenue, understandably pinned on the failure of Rocksteady’s ill-fated live-service pivot, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Rumours are swirling that Warner is looking to sell off part of its gaming business as it seeks to arrest a 70% decline in its share price since its 2022 merger with discovery; in the meantime Warner demon-king David Zaslav says the publisher is exploring licensing its IP stable to other game companies. I am getting a big ‘five minutes to midnight’ vibe off Warners of late. Feels like something very messy is on the cards. 
• The Turkish government has blocked access to Roblox “due to content that could lead to the exploitation of children”. Bit conflicted by this, to be honest. Obviously Erdogan is a massive wrong’un, but Roblox has had this coming for years and I can’t help but take a little comfort in it finally reaching the ‘finding out’ stage.
• In news that will surprise absolutely nobody, the Borderlands movie is absolute bobbins. When reviews landed last week, the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the flick a ‘freshness’ rating of zero percent; today Variety is describing its opening-weekend box-office take of $8.8m as “embarrassing”. 
• It’s been a good week for students of the classics. Doom and Doom II have been bundled in a lavish new edition, with native widescreen, achievements, a package of 25 multiplayer maps playable cross-platform and half a dozen bonus ‘episodes’, one of which is a collaboration between staffers at Id, Nightdive and MachineGames. Elsewhere, modders have revived one of Hit Points’ favourite games of all time, Outrun 2006, on PC. They’ve even got multiplayer back up and running. Absolutely sumptuous stuff to which I lost a few blissful hours over the weekend.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Hit Points isn’t the fan it used to be of intimidatingly hench Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. It would of course not say this to his face, but his decision to merge with Zynga, close Roll7 and as good as shutter Private Division has rather taken the shine off things. Still, credit where it’s due for this extravagant burn, deployed when GI.biz asked him whether the confirmed release of this year’s Call Of Duty on Game Pass at launch has got him reconsidering the value of putting big-ticket games on subscription services at launch.

“No, it won’t affect our decisions. Because our decisions are rational.”

Ouch.

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