#190: Off the leash
A hands-off Microsoft may have let Harvey Smith speak a little bit too freely.
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I’ve heard some pretty nightmarish stories about how Microsoft runs its game teams over the years. Sadly none of them are repeatable, at least not in this sort of setting — for future reference should you ever meet me in person, I tend to loosen up after precisely two Old Fashioneds, or about half a Newport Martini — and in fairness, none of them are all that recent. In any case there is a decent body of public evidence to prove that Microsoft, over the years, has been a far from ideal parent to its game-industry kiddos. Witness, to name a few, the mishandling and eventual closure of Lionhead; the years-long struggle to get half of Halo Infinite out the door; and the transformation of Rare from globally respected game studio into a battery farm for Xbox Avatars and Kinect games.
Things are very different these days, as far as I can tell; Rare is good again, for a start. In Hit Points’ beloved documentary series Double Fine Psychodyssey, Tim Schafer explained that his studio’s acquisition by Microsoft was going to change everything in terms of financial security, but very little in the day-to-day operation of the company; Double Fine would still be Double Fine, and Microsoft would run it at arm’s length. And back in 2020, Bethesda figurehead Todd Howard said his new parent company was “very creator-driven — we’re still going to get to be who we are. We’re a subsidiary, but we’re still running our games and pushing everything the way that we [always] have.”
The Xbox overlords are a little less… well, overlord-y, and while we must naturally celebrate that, it is not an approach entirely bereft of shortcomings. For one thing, the yawning chasms of time between tentpole firstparty releases suggests that Microsoft might benefit from the Sauron-like eye of a Steve Ballmer, or the occasional crack of the old Don Mattrick-era whip. And I wonder whether, after the events of this week, Microsoft might be summoning its arm’s-length subsidiaries to the Redmond mothership for some good old-fashioned media training.
Enter Harvey Smith, the revered Arkane designer who has been on the interview circuit this week for a round of previews for the forthcoming Redfall — previews which I imagine Microsoft’s PR, marketing and legal teams have largely read through the gaps between their fingers. Firstly we have Smith’s positioning of Redfall’s vampires as an allegory for the super-rich. A story of a blood-sucking threat unleashed on the world by an unchecked Big Pharma seems, in turn, quite allegorical about the terrors visited on the real world by an unchecked Big Tech.
“The thematics are that the 0.1% are already vampires,” he told Eurogamer. “And in this game, they literally become vampires.” He told Inverse: “Vampires are a pretty good metaphor for today, where a tiny group of people are living like kings at the expense of everyone else. Rivers are drying up, well water is being poisoned by various chemical processes, California is burning and covered in snow. Meanwhile, people have islands, private jets and all. There’s a tiny group of people feeding on everyone else.” Is one of those people Satya Nadella, who laid off 10,000 people in January after taking home $55m last fiscal year, and wrote the cheque for the ZeniMax acquisition that got Redfall made? I think perhaps he is, yes. Cripes, Harvey! Mind how you go!
That’s a bit awkward, sure, but if anything I respect it. Sure, there may well be some furrowed brows at Microsoft HQ reading all that, but who cares about them? From a consumer perspective this is a ringing endorsement of the freedom the contemporary Xbox operation affords its subsidiaries. And from the point of view of a veteran of the games media, it’s incredibly refreshing to hear someone in Microsoft’s employ actually speaking their mind.
There used to be a running joke among the journo set that when you were interviewing someone from Microsoft, it didn’t actually matter who it was, because you’d be getting the same answers either way. Their media training was so vigorous, their responses to email Q&As ping-ponged between so many departmental stakeholders, that the person to whom the quotes would eventually be attributed was effectively a theoretical construct. Microsoft PR might as well have made up a name (and on a few occasions I suspect they actually did). That changed when Phil Spencer took over, to an extent: the man’s great skill is that he even makes the script sound genuine and off the cuff. But this goes much further. Despite the billions spent, it appears Microsoft is happy to let Harvey be Harvey, even if what he says ends up being a bit off-piste. Good shit.
However! Letting Harvey be Harvey may well have landed Microsoft in a spot of bother, and led them to reconsider the wisdom of letting their creatives run quite so far off the lead. In an interview with IGN France, Smith appears to have let slip that Redfall was originally in development for PS5 — until Microsoft had Arkane abandon it when its acquistion of ZeniMax completed. “We got bought by Microsoft and that was a huge change,” he said. “They said, ‘No PlayStation 5. Now we’re gonna do Game Pass, Xbox, and PC.’”
Ah. This is… not great, I think, when Microsoft is in the final stages of its bid to persuade regulators to approve a $68.7bn acquisition. It is particularly awkward given that some of said regulators are wary of trusting Microsoft precisely because of what it said about exclusivity before it bought Bethesda, and what it has done with its games since the deal completed. “We haven’t pulled any games from PlayStation,” Microsoft told IGN in a statement. This is, in true Microsoft style, a very precise choice of words. It makes a careful silent distinction between games that had been either already been announced or signed for Sony’s console — specifically Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo — and titles that were merely in development for them until Microsoft took their makers over, such as Starfield and Redfall.
Sure, nothing Smith is saying here is particularly surprising; it merely confirms what we had all assumed had happened. But having it in the public domain at such a critical time for Acquisition Blizzard is pretty awkward for Microsoft. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company is hurriedly reassessing its policy for subsidiary media training, and Phil Spencer is faux-casually pinging Don Mattrick to ask him where he used to keep the whip.
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