Harvey Smith has revealed that he had to negotiate with Microsoft to get laid-off Arkane Austin developers back into the office so the studio's final Redfall patch could ship — after the team had already been, in his words, fired.
Redfall launched to negative reviews in 2023 and proved to be the last project for Arkane Austin, the Texas team behind 2017's Prey that also worked on Dishonored and its sequel. Microsoft announced the studio's closure in May 2024, leaving 96 developers out of work and cancelling the game's post-launch roadmap. But version 1.4 was already in the pipe.
Speaking to The Game Business, Smith laid out how it got out the door.
We finished the game and it was very poorly received. We then worked on it for a year. We patched thousands of bugs. We then got laid off, but we had in the pipe version 1.4. It was the one that fixed tons of stuff. So, we went to Microsoft and said, ‘I know we don’t work here anymore, but can we please release this?’ And to their credit, they did not say no.
Microsoft agreed. “They let six or seven of us sign forms that we could come back in the building,” Smith said. “After being fired, we released 1.4, which I think if we had that on day one, it wouldn't have set the world on fire, but it was a much, much better game.”
Ben Horne, Redfall's production director at the time, put it more bluntly: “It feels like an achievement unlocked for me in my career, to release something after I've been fired and the studio closed down.”
Smith also declined to lay the project's direction entirely at Microsoft's door. Redfall was a departure from the immersive sims Arkane was known for, built during the industry's push into live service, and Smith said the studio walked into that willingly.
Arkane is very specialized, but the industry is growing, and there’s always more mouths to feed. And it’s great when you can reach a wider audience. We got swept up in the games-as-a-service thing, and I had the foolish chutzpah to assume that it always works out for us.
Then the rest of the cycle piled on. “In the middle of all that, COVID happened,” Smith said, along with the great resignation sending staff remote, and a run of local disasters: “There were fires. The government announced aliens at some point. There was a swarm of murder hornets coming toward Texas. We had an ice storm that put power and water out for like two weeks for some people.”
Patch 1.4 did not rescue the game's reputation. PC Gamer contributor Rick Lane, who went back to Redfall after the update, wrote that it “still isn't the game it needs to be, or the one Arkane Austin could have made,” while adding that “the update shows that Arkane could have redeemed it in the long run.”
Two years on, another Arkane studio's future is unsettled: Arkane Lyon, currently building Marvel's Blade, is in the process of being sold as part of the Xbox “reset.”