Rare being controlled by Activision could actually be a good thing – Reader’s Feature

Sea Of Thieves – maybe Rare will make another game one day (Xbox Game Studios)

As the Xbox reset continues, and developers including Rare and Halo Studios are put under Activision’s supervision, a reader suggests that could work out for the best.

It’s hard to know what to say when you can’t remember if this is the second or third time Xbox has laid off hundreds of people at once this year. Knowing they’ve still got thousands to go is mind-boggling, considering how much they’ve cut back already, and I’m sure makes every day at work a ton of fun for everyone at Xbox.

It’s all terrible, obviously, but I was interested in the fact that it happened to coincide with the 24th anniversary of Microsoft buying Rare, one of the first developers they bought and at the time something that was seen as Xbox really moving into the big leagues, at the expense of Nintendo (the original Xbox did outsell the GameCube – the only time an Xbox console didn’t come last in its generation).

But, of course, we know it never worked out. Everything they released at first, which must’ve been intended for the GameCube originally, was pretty bad, like Grabbed By The Ghoulies, Kameo: Elements Of Power, and Perfect Dark Zero. Viva Piñata was okay, but it clearly would’ve done a lot better on the Wii, given Xbox’s reputation as the shooterbox and generally older audience.

Thinking about it now, I wonder what would’ve happened at that point, if Microsoft hadn’t come up with Kinect and forced Rare to waste their time working on that for years. Would they have shut the company down or sold it off in the early 2010s?

Seems like a real possibility that they might, given the only thing Rare has made since being allowed out of Kinect jail is Sea Of Thieves. There’s still no sign of them doing anything else and now they’re under the control of Activision who… will probably be a lot better at managing them than Microsoft was.

After all the reports of bad management at Microsoft I don’t think it could be any more obvious that they don’t know how to run a games developer (or probably anything creative) but Activision have been doing it for decades. They’re not exactly the most creative or experimental publisher out there, to say the least (they did publish Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice though!), but they at least understand the business and know how to work with a developer.

Activision has also taken over Halo and Age Of Empires as well and I feel that if Activision was in charge from as soon as Bungie left we wouldn’t have been going so long without new games. Call Of Duty is the only non-sports game left that’s still yearly, so Activision knows how to pump games out.

Of course, the obvious danger is that Rare and the rest just become support studios, like so many Activision developers before them, working on Call Of Duty or whatever other menial job Activision gives them. The other option is they get sold after a few years of Microsoft pretending they tried to get them back into making games.

Although maybe there’s a third and even wilder option: that Microsoft tries to sell off Activision and Bethesda as a whole and they’re just bundling them up now, neat and tidy, to make an easier sale. Kind of like buy Activision, get Rare free.

But for the sake of now I’m going to assume that doesn’t happen and that Activision is actually able to impose some order on things. After all, both Rare and Halo Studios have been terrible at getting any games finished and I feel Activision wouldn’t let that slide the way Microsoft has.

It all depends how many Microsoft people have infiltrated Activision, which I don’t think we have any way of telling, but if the company is still more or less the same as when Microsoft bought them then I think there’s a good chance that this could actually be a positive move for Rare and the others. Not a good move exactly but definitely better than just withering away under Microsoft’s direct control.

By reader Trepsils

Activision used to deal with more than just Call Of Duty (Activision)

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