8 Biggest Xbox Risks (That Totally Backfired)
7. Buying Rare
Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie, 007 Goldeneye, Conker's Bad Fur Day: the list of games developed by Rare for Nintendo systems is long and illustrious. It solidified the team at the turn of the millenia as one of the most trustworthy and talented studios around.
And then, in 2002, Microsoft won the bidding war and acquired them and there was a general unsettled hush across the land.
This didn't automatically mean that Rare was incapable of producing good games but Microsoft would have to support them properly as the problems were plain to see. For every moody shooter like Goldeneye, Rare would produce three incredible titles with warm, cutesy visuals. Conversely, people flocked to the Xbox for Halo, Gears of War and Call of Duty - not Banjo-Kazooie and Diddy Kong Racing.
Rare's workforce saw the mismatch too. Around the acquisition, many of the studio's prominent developers left the company for pastures new. What this meant was that Rare was releasing new properties to an untested audience without the guidance of key staff, and Xbox had spent $375m on a studio that was losing it's brightest stars.
Even the brilliant Viva Piñata games failed to sell, and it prompted Rare's founders to abandon ship, claiming that Microsoft didn't market them correctly.
Thus began an era of Rare being assigned to work on lowly Kinect games - awful stuff that was truly beneath them - as the gaming industry shook its collective head as if to say "look how they massacred my boy". Once the most respected developers in the world, now reduced to a cog in the machine.
You may rightfully argue that Rare's Sea of Thieves has been a hit but one successful new IP since 2002 pretty much tells you everything you need to know.