| fleischr said: With the recent sale of the Gears franchise to Microsoft, I got to thinking -- is there a precedent for a games franchise made BETTER after it was acquired by someone else? I get the general impression that it really has never worked out. A lot of platforming games come to mind: -Crash Bandicoot -Banjo Kazooie -Spyro (May be the possible exception? People seem to like Skylanders an awful lot) What do you think? |
Absolutely not an exception. Spyro went to hell after he was sold. I've never been so brokenhearted about a franchise. Skylanders came much later, and is more the resurrected, mutilated corpse of Spyro than actually Spyro. There's a reason Spyro isn't in the title anymore. Spyro is DEAD. Deader than any character has ever been in the history of intellectual property. Skylander's success just makes Spyro even MORE dead.
Regarding the original question, it almost never happens that an IP truly changes hands and becomes indisputably better after being sold. Sometimes great IPs continue to be great IPs, but rarely does a bad or mediocre one start to become good, and quite frequently really good ones become horrendous. When someone buys an IP, they do so for money. On the other hand, when a company keeps an IP but has another company develop a game with it, they still care about it and tend to only give the IP to someone they trust to do it justice.
