Quite a few people left Rare before and after Microsoft bought them not a fan of the comparisons being made your talking about Rare in it's prime with nearly all of it's pieces intact and the company we have now.

Being that a few of those games started in 2001 for the Gamecube (Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo) and a couple of those games are re-releases of N64 games with minor upgrades (Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, Perfect Dark) the list isn't all that impressive for a system that has been on the market for 7 years ...

As much as I love the Rare of old, their lack of success on the XBox and XBox 360 is because of problems that were becoming obvious at the end of the N64 generation. While most games for the Playstation and N64 could be developed by a relatively small team (12 to 20 people) working for 12 to 15 months, Rare was a company of 200 people spread across several development teams of 20 to 30 people that were taking 18 to 24 months to release games. While their games were high quality, at the end of the generation Rare was releasing games at half the rate they used to while costing Nintendo twice as much as they should have and the games were becoming less successful.

Nintendo sold their share of rare for hundreds of millions of dollars, bought Retro for a fraction of the cost, and received roughly as many exclusive titles (Metroid Prime 1, Metroid Prime 2, Metroid Prime 3, Metroid Prime Hunters, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Mario Kart 7) all developed for a lower cost and resulting in higher sales that what Rare was able to do.

All Microsoft got from Rare was the name of a studio and a few IPs (Banjo Kazooie, Killer Instinct and Perfect Dark) and with how little they produced for the XBox they probably realized that ...

I understand what you mean. In fact, I'm with you, but if Microsoft intended for Rare to be the studio that they were, then we would've gotten more games out of them including M rated games, but we didn't. Instead we got Avatar and Kinect; though I'm not trying to discount the success they've achieved in those department.

And how many of their games were advertised with even a tenth of what they threw at epic bungie or turn 10?

I have never witnessed a single ad for Rare games on 360. Not to say they don't exist, but that I've seen about 100 gears commercials lifetime.

It's a problem with branding. There are lots of great games for xbox that don't fit the "gritty tough guy marine" genre that don't sell, but similar games sell well on other platforms. It's a problem with WHO buys your system. If all you advertise to the public is tough guy shooters, then the people will think that's what your system library is. Nobody is going to buy a system just to play Viva Pinata. MS bought Rare in order to assist with more diversification, to have FPS and platforming/creative games. That was the point. THen they fault them when people don't buy the system? It's short-sighted, and poorly handled, imo.

So there you have two factors. One, no advertising, and two, branding.

Now they're turned Rare towards making Kinect games. They take the studio they hired to diversify, and are using them to diversify. It shows that they understand what the studio is there for, but it shows a clear lack of understanding on what type of diversification they're supposed to be there for. You want Kinect games, then hire a new studio. As it stands, they've abandoned the genre they've hired Rare for, and put them on a fad genre.

Shame how MS has under-utilized Rares IPs.