Jason Schreier sier at flere veier fortsatt kan redde Arkane Lyon og Marvel's Blade

Microsoft gave Arkane Lyon until 13 November to find a buyer, with 217 jobs and Marvel’s Blade attached to the outcome.

The date comes out of French labour law, not out of any softening at Xbox. The unions sitting across the table from Microsoft describe the redundancy talks as going badly. The reporter who has covered most of this year’s Xbox restructuring still expects Arkane to exist in December.

Le Monde reported this week that Microsoft told Arkane’s management on 16 July that it intended to close the Lyon studio. An immediate shutdown was not available to it. French law requires any company employing more than 1,000 people to spend three months looking for a buyer for an operational arm it plans to close, and only after that search fails can the closure go ahead. The search began over the summer and ran in parallel with consultation at the Social and Economic Committee and negotiation of a job protection plan. Talks on the redundancy plan are officially open until Friday 30 October. Consultation on the closure itself ends on 13 November, the date by which Microsoft either has to find a new owner or take the decision it signalled in July.

“Negotiations on the redundancy plan are going badly.”

— Simon, Printemps Écologique

The representative, named only by a first name in the report, wants the plan rewritten around a job market that is not absorbing developers. His argument is that a standard package assumes people find comparable work, and that the prospects for returning to work in the industry are extremely limited right now. Both Printemps Écologique and the Video Game Workers’ Union have asked for the deadlines to be pushed back. The redundancy negotiation reportedly includes attempts to move Arkane staff into other Microsoft studios, which is the quiet alternative to a sale and the one nobody involved is describing as likely. Simon said Arkane staff are collateral victims of a change of strategy at Xbox, and the STJV has asked publicly how a closure squares with Microsoft’s profits.

Several forms of takeover are under consideration, according to the same representative, who is bound by confidentiality on the detail. Neither union has ruled out challenging the economic justification for the closure in court. The case they would make is that the financial picture Microsoft presented to the Works Council for years does not match the reasoning now being used to shut the studio.

“Microsoft is looking to divest itself of Arkane, even though the studio is doing well, in order to save money and improve the profitability of its short-term investments.”

— Simon

Microsoft did not confirm or deny the closure. It said it continues to explore various options for Arkane as part of the ongoing French consultation, and that it is keeping the Social and Economic Committee and its employees informed. Internal documents seen by the French outlet set out a different timetable: the plan for a total and definitive cessation of operations starts at the end of 2026 and runs through the first quarter of 2027. Back in July, Xbox said only that it was beginning required consultation with the Works Council to review potential strategic options.

Against that paperwork, Jason Schreier posted on Friday that more than one route to keeping the studio open is being worked on right now.

“My understanding is that there are multiple paths actively being explored that would save Arkane Lyon.”

— Jason Schreier

He allowed that negotiations can turn, but said he would be surprised at this point if Arkane were shut down.

The union’s account of Marvel’s Blade does not line up with the reporting around it. Simon told the French outlet the game is nearing the end of production. Arkane was once under risk since before the consultation opened: The Verge reported in June that Microsoft was weighing the closure of at least five studios, that it wanted Blade cancelled as part of the cuts, and that the game’s internal ship date had already slipped to late 2027 while running over budget. Insider Jeff Grubb has said development still has years left to run. I would not weigh a negotiator’s production estimate and a leaked internal schedule as the same kind of claim, because one is an argument for the studio’s value and the other is a document.

Blade was announced at The Game Awards in December 2023 and has not been shown since. I have no read on it: one teaser and three years of silence tell me nothing about whether it is a systems game in the Arkane sense or a licensed action game with the studio’s name on the box. Todd Howard visited the Arkane office earlier this year and said work was going well, which is close to the sum of what anyone has said about it in public. In July, Xbox insisted that none of its publicly announced first-party games or projects would be cancelled in the restructuring, a line that has not been repeated since the Lyon closure plan surfaced.

The studio has stood this close to the end before. Harvey Smith, who co-directed Dishonored, said in an August interview that Arkane was four months from closing when it committed to the game, after a stretch of contract work that had it running nine projects at once for other publishers. Dishonored returned four or five times its budget and gave the studio the identity Microsoft paid for nine years later.

That project was itself a fallback. Bethesda arrived with the option to build Thief 4 or a Blade Runner Game, could not secure either licence, and told Arkane to carry on with what it had and call it Dishonored. The studio Microsoft bought in the 2021 ZeniMax deal exists in its current shape because two licensing negotiations collapsed.

Closure is not the only bad ending available here, and a sale is not automatically a good one. Compulsion Games and Undead Labs came out of the same restructuring as independent studios, and so did Double Fine, which then cut around two dozen jobs. Ninja Theory is now expected to close after two acquisition deals fell apart. I keep watching the 217 figure rather than the studio name, because a rescue that lands on Double Fine’s arithmetic is a different result from the one the unions are negotiating for.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said earlier this month that the division had started to return to growth. The restructuring that produced that line will eventually remove 3,200 jobs across Xbox, and reports put three more rounds of layoffs still ahead, possibly starting before October is out. Talks on the Arkane redundancy plan close on 30 October. The consultation deadline, and with it the decision, falls on 13 November.