Finally, some good news! Krafton Inc., the South Korean gaming company best known for its work on PUBG and The Callisto Protocol, has acquired Tango Gameworks and the award-winning Hi-Fi Rush IP from Microsoft ahead of the studio’s closure.
Tango Gameworks, which developed the excellent Hi-Fi Rush in January 2023, will move from one company to the other, taking with it all the employees who would otherwise have been laid off. In a PR statement, Krafton calls this its “first significant investment in the Japanese video game market,” although other Tango video game IPs, including Ghostwire Tokyo and The Evil Within, will remain in the hands of Microsoft.
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This is quite sudden and exciting news in an otherwise depressing spate of layoffs and studio closures in the video game industry. The announcement that Microsoft would be closing Tango Gameworks, as well as Arkane Austin and Alpha Dog Games, hit the industry like a freight train. While all three studios had obvious merit, Tango had only recently won awards for Hi-Fi Rush – a relatively cheap game with a brand new IP, something Microsoft would apparently like to have in this current climate.
However, the company’s closure was announced as part of a cost-cutting restructuring when it acquired Activision Blizzard, which left many (including us) pretty unsettled. But here comes Krafton! Not only does the company secure a nice studio with some great games, but it will also get a tasty PR boost. On this point at least, Microsoft’s loss seems to be Krafton’s gain.
It’s sad that the Ghostwire and The Evil Within IP fell by the wayside, and this writer’s personal opinion is that those series are dead as a doornail. But you can’t have everything. Congratulations to the Tango team on this feature, good luck in the future, and kudos to Krafton for stepping in at the last minute and saving a team that shouldn’t have been fired anyway.
