Interview: Hi-Fi Rush director explains how game\u2019s stealth drop was an immense success Tango GameworksHi-Fi Rush was suddenly announced during the January 2023 Xbox Dev Direct, stunning the world with its stealth drop. We sat down with the game\u2019s director to understand more about the impact of this surprise release. During Xbox\u2019s January 2023 Developer Direct, many fans came into the event knowing what games to expect on display. From Minecraft, Redfall, and Forza, the community mostly knew the score. However, something new stole the spotlight, a game that was suddenly revealed and released to unsuspecting players, Hi-Fi Rush. The rhythm action game caught the gaming world by storm, not only through its shock release, but with its unique musical combat and a complete departure from Tango Gameworks\u2019 previous titles in The Evil Within and Ghostwire. It was shortly after its announcement at the Xbox Dev Direct when Hi-Fi Rush was made playable, to which many players and reviewers questioned why the devs would stealth drop such a unique and ambitious game so suddenly. Dexerto recently talked to John Johanas, director of Hi-Fi Rush, to ask why they decided on their Beyonce-esque stealth drop. Pushing back the announcement of Hi-Fi Rush \u201cOne thing that kind of prevented us from announcing it early,\u201d Johanas began, was the ongoing global situation at the time, he explained. \u201cThinking of a good opportunity to show it off, there\u2019s nothing. There\u2019s no shows, there\u2019s no chance to show it off.\u201d So instead of rushing to reveal Hi-Fi Rush to the masses at a time when the world was locked down, the team kept pushing back its announcement. Ultimately, these delays pushed us rather close to the planned release of the game in full. \u201cWe knew we wanted to do a short release timing because [Hi-Fi Rush] was something so different from our studio. It\u2019s very easy for people to misconstrue, or the perception to be weird,\u201d he said. The director explained that because it was such a departure from their previous works, with The Evil Within and Ghostwire: Tokyo preceding it, they had a feeling the wider reception from the gaming world would be one of suspicion and doubt, which they wanted to minimize as much as possible. Thus, keeping it under wraps for so long was clearly by design. \u201cThey could say, \u2018They made horror games, now they\u2019re making this colorful action game, it\u2019s probably going to be terrible. The music, I don\u2019t get it.\u2019 So we had to think about how we were going to market it and how we were going to get it across,\u201d Johanas added. He revealed that the team had different ideas of how to announce it, but they kept running into the risk of gamers being instantly negative about the project, to the point the team decided to announce it as close to release as possible, the very same day, in fact. \u201cThe opportunity came up to do the [Xbox Dev Direct], and they said \u2018Wouldn\u2019t it be cool if we could show it there and then release it very shortly after\u2019, and then that turned into, \u2018what if we released then?\u2019\u201d Naturally, if you put so much time and effort into a game, one Johanas described as his \u201cdream game\u201d, he and the team were naturally anxious about the public\u2019s reaction, especially with a release cycle that was so fast, it could\u2019ve gotten lost in the wave of other news from the show. But, as Johanas described, their PR and marketing team was confident in Hi-Fi Rush\u2019s greatness, knowing the game was unique and that it would naturally attract fans from the get-go. \u201cSo the perception was just to get it out there. So if anyone is skeptical they can play it right away. It\u2019s on Game Pass, so the barrier to entry is as low as possible.\u201d There are always risks when shadow-dropping However, Hi-Fi Rush\u2019s stealth drop wasn\u2019t without its critiques. Many indie devs urged others to not follow in Tango\u2019s footsteps as the chances of a game getting lost in the market increased. Johanas commented on the indie devs concerns, \u201cI do think it is an inherently risky venture. Just like I said, it could have gone wrong for us as well. \u201cBut even though we stealth dropped it, we stealth dropped it in a major marketing beat for Microsoft, so it wasn\u2019t like it appeared on Steam one day and no one knew what this thing was.\u201d But Johanas said he feels that it\u2019s completely fine to stealth drop a game, though devs should know the risks of doing so. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say that no one should ever shadow drop a game, and we\u2019ve seen since then titles get announced and say you can play it tomorrow, and that\u2019s exciting. I think if you\u2019re confident and you think you can pull it off, sure? But understand what risks you\u2019re taking.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interview: Hi-Fi Rush director explains how game\u2019s stealth drop was an immense success Tango GameworksHi-Fi Rush was suddenly announced during the January 2023 Xbox Dev Direct, stunning the world with its stealth drop. We sat down with the game\u2019s director to understand more about the impact of this surprise release. During Xbox\u2019s January 2023 Developer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}