Even if Rare had to be sold ... I'm not married to idea of Rare/Factor 5/Silicon Knights/whatever.
What I find troubling is that Nintendo has had multiple oppurtunities over the years to bring in a "new" Rare. A "new" Silicon Knights. To really expand Retro into a company that can legitimately make multiple games and is encouraged the freedom to make original IP.
But none of these materialize at all. Instead Nintendo becomes more insular and more Japanese. It's hard to deny that fact.
It's a ridiculous way to run a business when 80+% of the market is now in the West.
Why wasn't Rare properly replaced? They had plenty of $$$ to do so after the Wii ... how much would a studio like that have eased some of terrible droughts the 3DS and Wii U had?
Sony has been proactive in replacing/updating Western devs, when they first brought the Playstation to the West, 2nd parties like Psygnosis (WipeOut) and the NFL GameDay studio were integral to them. So was Naughty Dog. Sony has kept the best studio there (Naughty Dog), expanded them tremendously, but the rest of their Western developers are different today, they let some of those Western studios go, but replaced them with teams like Sony Santa Monica ... for the better.
Nintendo has gone in the opposite direction. Not shockingly, Playstation consoles have performed fairly rock steady in the West. With Nintendo they've up/down all over the place in the West.
