Duh. It's no coincidence that the only worthwhile Rare games since they left Nintendo are the Viva Pinata ones, a series that felt like it was a Nintendo franchise. There was no real audience for them on Xbox and trying to mold to fit the Xbox demo proved disastrous for them. Stuff like a Banjo Kazooie game that was desparate to be some kind of "cool" Ratchet and Clank knockoff instead of an actual Banjo game. 

Ratchet and Clank was a vehicle builder/platformer? And what are the games Rare made for Xbox demo especifically that proved disastrous?

Why would they buy Playtonic? They haven't proved themselves yet. I don't want a repeat of Mighty No. 9, after all.

But they didn't sell Rare.

There were many indications that Mighty No.9 would be a trainwreck from way before it came out. Yooka Laylee doesn't seem to be showing any signs so far of a similar disaster.

Read things in context Project Dream was this suposedly ambitious rpg but from the words of people from the Conker team when they were doing their developer commentary of Conker BFD it wasn't very good and at most was a Crash Bandicoot clone and not a good one. Secondly Dream didn't become Banjo it got shelved and some of the ideas went on to be used in Banjo Tooie.

Rare were far from efficient in the late 90s.

I'm not sure what game you played, yes the game may have been a let down as far as Starfox story franchise goes. But the game definitely wasn't a bad game! 

Thank you! I can't believe people woudl say that Star Fox Adventures was a bad game. It wasn't no where near a bad game. Sure it wasn't of the normal Star Fox vein, but it was still a great game.

Paying something like 250million $ in Nintendos situation back then, wasn´t really viable, it was shortly after N64 and early GC days. Considering that you never know what happens with the talent after a buyout it was a very big risk, because you might end up with a lot of developers without the leaders to direct them accordingly. If you also add the human component, I mean despite all this beeing a business I wouldn´t be surprised if they felt betrayed by the Stampers brothers after alle these years, so I´m not too suprised they didn´t want to make the Stampers Brothers even richer by buying them out.

Rares departure surely caused a hole in Nintendos lineup especially during GC days, because in colaboration with Nintendo they really created popular games together. But looking at Rare today, it´s clear who got the even worse deal, none of the classic Rare IPs became blockbusters on the Xbox systems and if it weren´t for the very successful WiiSports rip-offs, Rare might even have been Lionbeheaded as well by now.

From a gamers perspective I really think that an ongoing Nintendo+Rare relationship would have lead to more prolific games. Perfect Dark, Kameo would have been launched during the 128bit generation just an example of how much time they wasted due to all the structural changes they had to go through due to what happened.

I don't know. I've always been wary of the whole kickstarted spirital successor game. Anyway, I'm pretty sure Playtonic would prefer to be independent.