Starfox

[Dark Jaguar]

As I said in a thread I just made a massive wave of MS firings and closures is expected soon, but I haven't heard Rare mentioned in any of it, so I guess MS is keeping whatever's left of them... though I can't imagine it's much given that Everwild was cancelled some time back and they surely fired most of the staff at the time, I think all that's left is basically a Sea of Thieves support studio right?

I suppose that's a better fate than before Sea of Thieves, when they were reduced to an Avatar cosmetic studio.

My bigger concern is that as they steadily cut free one studio they ate up after another, are they intending to horde all those IPs?  If there's one thing I've learned from all these "spiritual successor" projects it's that they are often letdowns and the fans of the original IP often don't migrate over.

Yooka Laylee is an interesting case.  Replaylee really did fix almost every single complaint about that game!  It's one of the most stunning comeback stories I've seen.  Of course, there's also games like Final Fantasy XIV and No Man's Sky, two other major examples of such a dramatic comeback.  It's too bad Mighty Number 9 hasn't had such a case.

But, back to my original notion....  It's going to be VERY hard for companies like Rare or others to truly break free if MS just decides to sit on a bunch of IPs they never intend to actually touch, like a dragon on a hoard of treasure.  I'm thinking about all those Sierra properties.  Outside of the King's Quest revival from several years back, we haven't seen a single one of those properties in use.  Every now and then, MS will trot out some unexpected surprise like the Killer Instinct or Battletoads revivals, and then just tuck them away to languish.  Perfect Dark AAAA (as I jokingly call it, since no one can tell me what a forth "A" even means) would have been another example.  In every case, no one at Rare actually had anything to do with it, they just farm out the property to random studios to see what happens.  They may as well have been fan projects or totally unique IPs at the end of the day.  That's my big fear.  They're all cut free, but MS keeps the IPs, and we're left with nothing as the companies are left to rot without ANY way to actually support themselves.

Further, if they cut recent MASSIVE acquisitions like Zenimax and Activision, they likely aren't going to do anyone any favors and "defuse" what needs defusin', like cutting Id from Bethesda, or cutting Blizzard off of Activision.  I get the distinct feeling they're just preparing to wind down XBox as a gaming platform entirely, in favor of their AI ventures.  Their new head of XBox hasn't been shy about lying to everyone's faces after all.  Why believe even a single word she says, about literally anything, going forward?