Hi-Fi Rush gets a bittersweet last patch as Tango Gameworks takes its final bow: 'Thank you again… You're all rockstars!'

One last update before Tango Gameworks goes away forever.

May 15, 2024 - 22:50

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Hi-Fi Rush gets a bittersweet last patch as Tango Gameworks takes its final bow: 'Thank you again… You're all rockstars!'

Just days after Microsoft announced the upcoming closure of Tango Gameworks (alongside Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Games), the studio has released one final patch for the outstanding rhythm-based action game Hi-Fi Rush.

Hi-Fi Rush was unequivocally great. It holds an "overwhelmingly positive" user rating on Steam across more than 23,000 user reviews and an 87% aggregate score on Metacritic, although—full disclosure here—we gave it a less-than-stellar 69% in our own review. It was also "a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations," in the words of Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg, who added, "We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release."

Yet somehow that big, undeniable success—which came on top of past critical success with The Evil Within games and Ghostwire: Tokyo—wasn't enough to justify keeping the studio around. Even more baffling, less than a day after killing Tango Gameworks, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty had the nerve to hold a town hall meeting in which he said, "We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards." (Here's what Hi-Fi Rush director John Johanas thought of that).

Context matters and, as staff writer Harvey Randall noted in his analysis of the situation, Hi-Fi Rush wasn't exactly a low-budget indie game. But neither was it a major blockbuster like Halo, Forza, or pretty much everything Activision Blizzard does, a point driven home by its stealth release in January 2023—aside from some dedicated rumor-watchers, nobody knew it even existed prior to its launch. As Harvey put it, if Hi-Fi Rush wasn't considered a relatively small, side-project kind of thing, why roll the dice on a zero-hype, "take it and go" launch?

Not enough? #HiFiRush #TangoGameworks — (Image credit: Kazuaki Egashira (Twitter))

There was no better answer to be found in Xbox president Sarah Bond's explanation of the closure, which explained nothing at all. Ultimately, it seems to come down to a single, bleak thought: Making good games—even when they're commercial and critical hits—isn't enough to guarantee a secure future. Decisions are made in corporate boardrooms, where the game themselves are essentially irrelevant.

It's not as though we haven't seen plenty of evidence to that effect over the past half year and a half, but the closure of Tango Gameworks lands like a particularly egregious reminder that the gears of capitalism will grind anything that adds up to a better percentage in a quarterly report. The development legend and Tango founder Shinji Mikami's reaction summed it all up in a word: "sad".

Anyway, to the matter at hand: