While Bethesda and Arkane Studios' Prey has seen much critical acclaim and has even been hailed as some of the developer's finest work to date, it's hardly secret that it never sold all that well. While the exact reasoning behind its commercial performance hasn't been officially quantified up until now, the fact that the game effectively took over an existing IP may have had something to do with that.
Namely, Prey was also the title of the unrelated 2006 FPS that was supposed to get a sequel, only for it to get canceled by Bethesda in 2011. The 2006 title's fan base was understandably confused when Arkane Studios announced its 2017 immersive sim would be Prey, too. However, a recent interview with studio founder, Raphael Colantonio, reveals that the whole confusion was caused by Bethesda, who forced the title upon Arkane's then-unnamed game.
Colantonio left Arkane Studios after Prey launched in 2017 and was free to discuss his experience working on the game with Bethesda as part of his recent interview with the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. "I did not want to call this game Prey," he said. "I had to say I wanted to anyway in front of journalists." Colantonio said that he hated lying about the matter to the press, but that he was effectively forced into doing that by Bethesda. According to Colantonio, the publisher's insistence was "very, very hurtful," and was one of the reasons why he ended up leaving Arkane.
Most notably, Colantonio was also aware of the adverse effects of naming Arkane Studios' new flagship after the game that Bethesda canceled years ago. "It was never our intention to steal their IP," he said, describing the whole ordeal as "gross" and a situation in which everyone lost. At that point in Arkane's development of Prey, Colantonio and his team were already certain that they'd lose sales from fans of the 2006 FPS and from those who wanted to see the version of Prey 2 that Bethesda canceled, and he was adamant that this wasn't a good decision.
While a certain Doom Eternal Easter egg possibly teased Prey 2, it doesn't seem like Arkane Studios is actually working on a follow-up at this time. The vampire-slaying FPS Redfall is its next big release, and seems to be leaning more towards being an actual FPS rather than an immersive sim. Colantonio himself, on the other hand, opened up a small-scale studio that specializes in immersive sims specifically, launching Weird West earlier this year.
As critical as he may have been of Bethesda's insistence on using the Prey IP for Arkane's sci-fi immersive sim, Colantonio was still thankful for the publisher's support and funding. Following the launch of Deathloop and Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda, Arkane is an extremely valuable asset. Whether its next game is a true immersive sim or not, however, remains to be seen.
