With the Hi-Fi Rush IP secured by publisher Krafton at the eleventh hour, Tango Gameworks was saved from the cutting room floor, a victim of Bethesda's bloody Microsoft-mandated restructure. In a year full of layoffs and studio closures, it remains one of the few positive industry occurrences, and the love fest continues, with Krafton pledging the developer its unstinting support.
It's not something you see every day, and Krafton CEO Changhan Kim spoke to Game Developer about the "last-minute deal". Kim said that "we wanted to maintain their legacy" by "[acquiring] as many people as possible", but as time was of the essence, the PUBG publisher didn't fight for Tango's other IP (like The Evil Within or Ghostwire: Tokyo).
While the Tango Gameworks deal is still being finalized, Kim could not comment on how much Krafton spent on the acquisition, but he did say: "[It was] not too expensive, or too cheap, either. We cannot really translate the volume into money. It's more about the significance; the dollar amount was not really important to Microsoft."
Encouragingly, Kim wants to champion creativity without fear of failure and, in a rare move, appears to have given the studio a blank cheque. Noting that Tango's previous games "may not even have broken even", Kim concludes: "We can't acquire Tango Gameworks based on their financials or their numbers, right? We don't think Hi-Fi Rush 2 is going to make us money, to be frank. But it's part of our attempt. We have to keep trying [to develop games] in the spirit of challenge-taking."