Xbox’s new reshuffle has seen Rare moved under Activision, 24 years after Xbox outbid the publisher for the studio.
Rare has mostly been seen as one of the biggest drop offs in games. While the studio’s Sea of Thieves is seemingly super successful, it was one of the powerhouse developers of the 1990s only to flounder throughout the 2000s and 2010s; the big shift being when Rare was purchased by Microsoft.
While the studio did release some great games during this era like the Viva Pinata duology and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts (which I get why people don’t like a new genre slapped onto an existing franchise), it never reached the highs of its SNES and N64 output.
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And with Xbox’s latest wave of redundancies that continue the planned 3,200 jobs cut throughout FY27, Microsoft has announced that Rare will be moved under Activision as part of this reshuffling. But as pointed out by co-founder of The Game Business, Chris Dring, this could’ve been a reality for the studio back in 2002.
Dring notes that when Nintendo declined to buy the remaining 51% of the studio a bidding war for the developer started that was eventually won by Xbox, with the studio being purchased in September 2002 for $375 million. However, other than Xbox and Nintendo (who Microsoft’s Ed Fries claims was part of the bidding war after declining to purchase the studio), the other major interested party was none other than Activision.
And now, just over 24 years later, Activision is the home of Rare. Of course, it’s a very different company now than it was back in 2002, with the studio focusing on its successful live service title Sea of Thieves. But it does mean the PS1 and N64’s biggest platforming icons (outside of Mario, obviously) are now all under the Activision banner as Banjo joins Crash and Spyro.
