Huzzah! PUBG's publisher has saved Tango Gameworks and Hi-FI Rush - but The Evil Within and Ghostwire Tokyo are sticking with Microsoft
The Tango team - expected to meet unemployment - have all had their jobs saved.
Finally some good news! Krafton Inc, the South Korean games 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 created the excellent Hi-Fi Rush in January 2023, will be leaping from one company to the other, taking all the staff who would otherwise have been laid off with it. In a PR statement, Krafton describes this as its "first significant investment in the Japanese video game market", though other video game IP from Tango including Ghostwire Tokyo and The Evil Within remain in Microsoft's hands.
This is quite a sudden and exciting bit of news in what has otherwise been a depressing spree of video game layoffs and studio closure stories. The announcement that Microsoft was closing Tango Gameworks, alongside Arkane Austin and Alpha Dog Games, hit the industry like a frieght 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 seemingly would want in this current climate.
Nonetheless, its closure was announced in the wake of the Activision Blizzard aquisition in cost-cutting restructuring measures, leaving many (including us) quite said. But here comes Krafton! Not only is it netting itself a nice studios with some great games its belt, it also will surely get a tasty PR boost from this. It seems at least for this, Microsoft's loss is Krafton's gain.
It's sad that Ghostwire and The Evil Within IP have been left behind, and the personal opinion of this writer that those series are deader than doornails. But, you can't have it all. Congrats to the Tango team for landing on their feature, best of luck to them on their future endeavors, and kudos to Krafton for swooping in at the last minute and saving a team that had no business being laid off in the first place.