EDIT:

Apparently they are going to finish the final update, including adding a single player mode. That's a positive, I guess. Redfall is not the worst game ever made and it's good that people's hard work will be playable in the future.

Original message

This relates to the cuts at Bethesda, which I made a separate thread for, but I hope @zombiepie will indulge me here because I think this deserves its own thread.

Redfall was sold with a deluxe package, as most big games are these days, with promises of additional heroes being added to the game as paid DLC. Given how bad the game was when it launched the studio focused on fixing some of its problems, which I think most people understood, and news about the DLC didn't really come out. Some speculated that for the first anniversary of the game's launch (it launched on May 2, 2023) Microsoft might be announcing yet another promised update to the game (it was supposed to get an offline mode among other things) and a DLC roadmap. That didn't happen, and now we know the studio is closed and Redfall will receive no further updates, though it will stay online for some period of time so it is still playable for now.

While Microsoft has promised to "make good" for the people who purchased the DLC (I'd assume they'll refund either the whole purchase or the DLC portion, to the probably small number of buyers) they've had this money for over a year in some cases and knew at some point they weren't actually going to give what people paid for. This is, to put it mildly, a bad look, even if the number affected was small. Microsoft is not a small developer that has to make difficult decisions to keep the lights on. It's one of the biggest companies in the world. It could have put in the money to make the things it had pre-sold and it decided not to. Unclear what Arkane Austin has been up to since the last Redfall patch but clearly not this. I don't blame the individual developers, of course, though studio management did a horrendous job; at the end of the day this falls on Microsoft.

People will get refunds but this really shows just how bad pre-order culture has gotten in games. When one of the largest companies in the world can't be relied on to deliver what it sells you you really have to re-think the idea of trusting anything these companies say in terms of future benefits for money now. The greed is spectacular. The total lack of regard for reputational damage even moreso. I can't imagine that it would have cost that much to add a couple heroes to that game, and now Microsoft will be known as a company that doesn't keep its promises, even moreso than it already was. Maybe it's just counting on nobody really caring. Maybe that will be right.

Regardless, big publishers have been engaging in abusive pre-order practices for a long time, but not delivering the product is rare, and this deserves to be called out and remembered.

Is it as big a deal as developers losing their jobs? Of course it's not. Most people wouldn't have even played the characters anyway (and a prompt refund after the game flopped might have been acceptable). But as terrible as it is when people lose their jobs, bad practices towards consumers matter too, and deserve to be remembered.

> Be Microsoft
> Sell DLC for a game that you probably already know won't last
> Keep the money in a holding account to generate interest
> Refund purchases when the time is appropriate
> Keep the interest, literally making money out of nothing

Paperthin plan here, tale as old as time. Banks do this shit too.

@broshmosh: I don't think that was a "plan" though it is how things worked out. I think Microsoft probably planned on delivering the DLC, the payoff on interest on the at most tens of thousands of dollars of DLC Microsoft sold is such a pittance it's not worth it.

But it is how things worked out and I do think that part of the "plan" behind pre-order mania and selling season passes of content not yet produced IS something similar. Except they don't keep the money in a holding account they use it to fund other operations or investments or dividends or whatever. Pre-order money isn't in escrow and interest is higher than it has been but still pretty low.

So now they are going to finish the single player mode and release that. I have to admit that the not being able to pause thing was a serious issue for me (not that it's a good game in general but I found that incredibly obnoxious and it kept me from wanting to play in short spurts) so I may go back to this and finish it after the update is out.

On the other hand...oof. Imagine getting fired and then having to spend your notice period working on reworking the networking back end of the same horrible game that caused your studio to get shut down and that you've been working on for years and everyone hates. Grim times for those developers, though at least they'll be paid for that work I guess and it gives them more time to job serach while having an income.