A new report reveals that many developers working on Redfall wanted Microsoft to cancel the game before its release. Redfall received poor to mixed reviews upon its launch in May 2023, and it’s currently one of the lowest-rated AAA games of 2023.The Xbox Series X version of Redfall has a score of 56 on Metacritic, with its PC version sitting at 54. The user score is far lower, as the Xbox Series X and PC versions of Redfall have a player rating of 3.5 and 2.1, respectively, on Metacritic. Redfall players experienced a wide variety of problems, resulting in the game getting review bombed on Steam. Now, a new report shares that developers wanted Microsoft to cancel the game.Per a new Bloomberg report, Redfall began as a multiplayer game under ZeniMax, with a big focus on live service elements. In the report, there are many reasons given for the state of Redfall at launch, including a lack of a clear direction and the development team being understaffed. It states that by the end of Redfall’s development, around 70% of the staff that had worked on Prey had left Arkane Austin, with filling vacant positions also being a challenge.
Microsoft purchased ZeniMax in 2021, and some of the staff reportedly hoped that it would cancel Redfall or at least allow them to reboot the game as a single-player title. However, the report claims that Microsoft was pretty hands-off, allowing studios under ZeniMax to operate as usual. Bloomberg also mentions that Microsoft canceled a PlayStation version of Redfall that was reportedly in development, making it exclusive to Xbox Series X and PC.
There is a ton of other information in the report, including significant microtransactions plans that were only scrapped in 2021. While Redfall began as a live service title, it looks like a number of other factors contributed to the game’s poor release as well, with a lack of staff being a major issue.
As a result of its reception at launch, Redfall is already out of the top 50 most-played games on Xbox consoles despite being a month old. Redfall has a big focus on co-op gameplay, but it looks like users aren’t interested in playing the game even though it’s available at no extra cost on Xbox Game Pass. The Steam numbers are not any better, as only 73 gamers are playing Redfall at the time of this writing according to SteamDB.
Redfall is out now PC and Xbox Series X/S.