Former Founder of Arkane: Studio AAA No Longer Makes Games But Products

Raphael Colantonio, former founder of Arkane Studios left the company in June 2017, shortly after the release of Prey. After a long hiatus, Colantonio returned to the game industry but on an indie scale. Together with his friends from Arkane, he formed WolfEye Studios and is currently busy with a game called Weird West.

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Arkane Studios is still a very successful studio, with Bethesda as a publisher and Dishonored still showing its full potential, it is a big question why Colantonio left the studio while still in a safe position. It turned out that the reason for his legacy was more than just money.

In an interview with PC Gamer, the former studio boss from California explained that he deliberately switched to indie because the AAA game industry for him was no longer about making games that were as free and creative as possible, but more like building products.

“Because the numbers that AAA games have to reach, and those numbers are so high, you’re no longer making a game, you’re more like making a product,” Colantonio said. “There’s no way I’m going back to making AAA games, doing something that 90% of my effort is spent trying to figure out how the game doesn’t fail. This is not what I want when making games.”

Prey 16
Colantonio knew that if gaming companies were an industry and not just a hobby, then profit would certainly be the first thing that came to mind. But he doesn’t want creativity to be sacrificed for higher sales figures. He wants to do something that fits his idea and the idea of his team. He was tired of working as if he were in the car industry where after the release of the model 3, one department had to jump right into the model 4 project and so on. For him, such a thing will only destroy the creativity and enthusiasm of creative people.