The wide-sweeping cuts in Microsoft’s current restructuring of Xbox may just be putting one of its most storied studios on a knife-edge.
While there have already been announcements of studios being shuttered and reports of projects and studios taking hits, it’s being reported that at least five studios will be closed and a handful of games will be cancelled.
It appears that we can add French developer Arkane to the list of affected studios.
The studio made famous by the Dishonoured franchise has been working with Bethesda since 2022 on Marvel’s Blade — another entry in the comic book publisher’s video game universe reboot, which has faced some adversity in its development cycle and is reportedly dead… but in an undead sort of way.
Marvel’s Blade had already been pushed back from its intended 2024 release window as Bethesda, its publisher, diverted resources from the project to Indiana Jones and The Great Circle.
Aside from having the fangs of developer hell sunk into it, Marvel’s Blade has also reportedly become something of a money drain, which is the very thing Microsoft is out to eliminate.
There are also yet-unproven whispers that Xbox may instead try to sell off Arkane, which it has owned since March of 2021.
