Would Rare have been better off with Nintendo?

[Jon-Erich]

Seventizz said:

No. Rare has produced many good products you simply may not have played. Grabbed by the Goulies is fun, Conker Live & Reloaded would not have happened on another Nintendo console, Perfect Dark Zero was good in it's day, the Viva Piniatas were well received, BK: N&Bs was decent, and the Kinect games were of quality. Have you ever played Kinect Sports Rivals? No? It's actually a really good game not possible on any Nintendo console.

Rare is fine with Microsoft. Sea of Thieves was well received at E3 with many gamers excited in anticipation.

Conker Live & Reloaded wouldn't have happened but that's only because the Conker sequel would have. It is known knowledge that Chris Seavor was already in the early stages of working on the next Conker game despite the low sales of Bad Fur Day. The entire storyboard and initial planning for the game had already been completed. The reason the sequel never saw actual development was because of the Microsoft buyout. Microsoft felt that Bad Fur Day just had a run of bad luck and decided it needed another chance on Xbox. When Live and Reloaded failed to generate sales, that's when the sequel was cancelled for good. As for everything else you said, I would argue that Rare's best efforts under Microsoft was Viva Pinata.

The big question is would Rare have been better off with Nintendo? In my opinion, from a marketing perspective, yes. Nintendo knew how to sell Rare's games. Rare knew how to make games that would sell on Nintendo consoles. When Microsoft bought Rare, they looked at Rare as an equivilent of a third party developer and thought their games would sell well no matter what. The thing is, by that point, people bought Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games AND Rare games. So the people who wanted Rare's games already bought a Game or were planning to buy a GameCube. Also, Microsoft had no idea how to market these games. They depended on Rare to figure it out. That collaboration that Rare had with Nintendo wasn't there with Microsoft, but not because Microsoft didn't care. It's because they were still learning.

From a creative perspective, again, Rare would have been better off with Nintendo. Many people argue about the importance of creative freedom. What we don't about so much is when to intervene and when not to intervene. For the most part, Nintendo left Rare to do what they wanted. Occassionally, Nintendo would step in and intervene. For the most part, it was for the better and the games sold better as a result. With Microsoft, since they were new at publishing, their first reaction was to leave Rare alone. Unfortunately, that collaboration was no longer present. Then when that strategy didn't work, Microsoft then went to the other extreme and started cancelling projects left and right. Under Microsoft's leadership, Rare has cancelled more games than what they have released. 

To be fair though, an ownership under Nintendo or a continued partnership would not have been perfect. Keep in mind that prior to the Microsoft buyout, many talented people had already left Rare. Rare was still understaffed and an investment and expansion of Rare would have been needed. The transition to the 6th generation would have been rough no matter who their owner was. But I think in the long term, Rare would have been better off with Nintendo and all the people who left Rare afer the Microsoft buyout would be there right now.