Article is not detailed like that old Anthem one. Still, it was everything you expect. Zenimax pushing for live service games during the late 2010's so it could find a buyer (thank that for Fallout 76 and possibly killing the new Wolfenstein trilogy with Youngblood). Management trying to trend chase mediocre slop like Far Cry and Borderlands (it's fine if you like those, I like garbage too). It was also supposed to be filled with microtransactions until they pivoted in 2021. But the nail in the coffin was probably this:
Arkane was also perpetually understaffed, said people familiar with its production. The studio’s Austin office employed less than 100 people— sufficient for a relatively small, single-player game like Prey but not enough to compete with multiplayer behemoths like Fortnite and Destiny, which are developed by teams of hundreds. Even additional support from ZeniMax’s Wisconsin-based Roundhouse Studios and other outsourcing houses couldn’t fill the gaps, they say.
Yeah just make one of those smash hits in a genre outside your niche, in a saturated genre, with one tenth of the budget and none of the staff. Come on I've seen my kid play Fortnite it shouldn't be that hard.
Morale at Arkane suffered. Veteran workers who weren’t interested in developing a multiplayer game left in droves. By the end of Redfall’s development, roughly 70% of the Austin staff who had worked on Prey would no longer be at the company, according to people familiar as well as a Bloomberg analysis of LinkedIn and Prey’s credits.
R.I.P. Hope they got to work on cool shit after this. And fled T*xas.
Filling vacancies became a challenge. Within the industry, ZeniMax had a reputation for paying lower than average salaries, and convincing some progressive or moderate video game developers to move to Texas could be difficult due to the state’s conservative social policies. Since Redfall wasn’t yet announced, the studio couldn’t describe its details to prospective employees — a predicament that exacerbated the staffing issues, sources familiar with the process said. Arkane wanted to hire recruits with experience on multiplayer shooters, but the people who applied were by and large looking to work on single-player immersive sims.
:surprised-pika:
I honestly don't know how too. My best guess as someone who is not a gamedev is that most of the work on something like fortnite goes into network stuff, infrastructure, making the framework for an endlessly updatable "content platform" and a lot of research on player psychology so they can hook people on the freemium model. Also from what I remember Prey is very efficient with it's use of assets and mechanics.