Thread 723320860

>Pumps out 3 to 4 games a year, most of which end up being best sellers on their respective consoles
>Gets bought out by Microsoft
>Only manage to make half a dozen games in the span of 15 years
Why do people parrot the "Rare just doesn't want to make games anymore!" shit, when it's clearly the opposite? Especially after Gregg Mayles rage quit this year because Microsoft canned Everwild.

>>723320860 (OP)
>Rare just doesn't want to make games anymore
Literally noone has ever said that, some getting mad at things you've convinced yourself of.

So are we getting Kameo 2 or what?

To be fair, no game studio has a good output anymore (I guess accept the COD niggers). It’s an industry-wide plummet of standards

>>723320860 (OP)
>best sellers on their respective consoles
Reminder that Banjo Kazooie sold about as much as Croc: Legend of the Gobbos did.
Rare games on N64 mostly sold incredibly well, for N64 games. But if they'd sold as much on any other console they'd have been mostly forgotten about by now.

>>723320990
Nintendo does, and Rare used to be basically on their heels when it came to games. To the point some people still think banjo and dkc/dk64 were made by Nintendo.

>>723320860 (OP)
Rare with Nintendo Good

Rare with Microsoft Bad

>>723321139
They weren't with Nintendo back in the day, they just targeted their hardware specifically. It's not a gamefreak situation where Nintendo owns part of them or whatever.

>>723320860 (OP)
There was barely any competition on the N64. On the PS they would have been a mid tier developer at the most.

>>723321094
Back in the SNES and N64 days, Rare wasn’t just a great studio, they were Nintendo’s second soul. Every game was a landmark. DKC, BattleToads, Banjo-Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, these weren’t just titles, they were defining moments.

>>723321340
The SNES was the best console of its generation, and they were still top tier there.

I think Rare just had trouble adapting to the environment 6th gen and beyond. Game development really bloated in cost and scope by then.

>>723321340
jarpigstation

Now that Gregg Mayles left there's a chance they'll develop a new BK

>>723320860 (OP)
Rare was never good

Bumpity Bump

Sea of Thieves is the only good Microsoft game they made

>>723321139
This but unironically. MS buying Rare is one of the biggest tragedies in gaming

>>723325042
You obviously never played Kameo.

>>723320860 (OP)
>get bought by bigger company/investors
>"Your teams will now consist of 40,000 people who all change jobs every 2 years"
>nothing gets made and when it does it's soulless and fucked up
That's how it goes

>>723322174
>Game development really bloated in cost and scope by then.
This.
I don't think anything was wrong with the studio, but they did not do well trying to expand their team to meet the increase in game scope demand.

Rare seemed like a relatively small 40ish person studio that all knew each other and would get along (if those conker's bad fur day commentary videos were correct). Leading to a very natural and well done process of trying new things out, communicating well, and healthy fun competition between teams. Probably had a lot of fun working with each other.
And that works well when games were relatively simple compared to todays standards.

But as games got more complicated they likely had to expand their team to multiple hundreds to maybe even thousands and you just can't have the kind of working environment with huge teams.
So that Rareware souls just died under a pile of bureaucracy and bloat.

>>723322174
>>723326067
I can't believe we have interviews with so many ex-Rare staff members and you guys still vomit speculative bullshit

>>723320860 (OP)
rare was dying before they got bought out. I don't know what happened exactly, but after perfect dark released it was like all the remaining talent in the company vanished.

>>723320860 (OP)
I think they put something in the British water supply in 1999 that caused some sort of debilitating brain issue. It's the only explanation for post nintendo Rare titles.

>>723322089
Top LJN developer outside of DKC maybe.

Smaller teams of self-motivated savants making games they want to play > bloated teams of payroll monkeys making games designed by commitee

Do you want to know why? In the 90s and early 00s the best and brightest worked in the game industry. It was on the forefront of technology. The founder of DeepMind worked at bullfrog and lionhead. Black and white creatures use neural nets and reinforcement learning that is still used today in LLMs.

But the tech industry started hiring engineers for 10x the amount the game industry did in the early 2000s. Starting with Google and Amazon, Apple and Facebook joined in the late 00s.

When I was growing up I wanted to be a game developer because I was interested in the technology. The after graduating with a CS degree 15 years ago I looked at the market and realized I could make literally 10x the same amount while working fewer hours and with more intelligent people at a tech giant.

This is why the game industry has largely gone to shit. It went from dominated by the best and brightest to only the rejects, artists and passionless people dominating.

It's funny when people think game developers are filled with DEI instead of those people just being the only ones interested enough to apply to those applications. Any self respecting person doesn't go into game development. There are no interesting people you can work with. There is no frontier being pushed. The hours are shit. The pay is garbage.

I guess most kids on /v/ won't understand this but the quality of the people you work with is one of the biggest motivations for joining a company. If your team can't stimulate you intellectually you won't survive the workplace mentally.

If I could work with John carmack, demis hassabis and the like I would also be in the games industry. Those people now work in the regular tech and AI industry however so you need to join those places as well if you're an intelligent individual yourself as well.

A lot of the principal engineers I work with are ex-devs from the 80s-90s. Some guys from travelers tales, bullfrog and yes, Rare.

>>723326890
im not reading all that, faggot. lmao

>>723326318
I say it was burn out. They were putting out classic after classic in the early 90's then shit started falling apart later on: Conker's entire 64 game got reworked, Donkey Kong racing game never made it out of early development and Star Fox Adventures was in development hell. Nintendo probably saw the writing on the wall and was fine with cutting them loose.

>>723326318
What's even crazier is Nintendo somehow saw it coming and noped the fuck out.

>>723320860 (OP)
The games Rare made didn't have an audience in Xbox. that style of humor and aesthetics need to be cultivated and grown. Those fans of Rare didn't jump ship from Nintendo like Microsoft hoped for.

Something people never point out was that during this time Rare was selling their shares to Nintendo to fund so many projects at once.

>>723326890
Sure it makes no sense financially or healthwise but saying you would join some big tech company to rub shoulders with the most intelligent people sounds gay as hell, the kinds of problems you USED to deal with in tech were very different than the ones you dealt with in game dev so it would make more sense to say you were more interested in working with social networks than graphics programming.
And I say USED because modern tech giants dont produce anything worth, they are just there to spin money in the economy, you get multiple YT videos of ""burned out"" asians saying big tech is solved boring shit every month, you are right that it will give you way better quality of life but the job will be souless garbage 100%.

>>723329840
>The games Rare made didn't have an audience in Xbox
>that style of humor and aesthetics
If Rare had put out Battletoads game on the original XBox filled with early 2000's designs and humor, it would have been a hit.

Instead you got ghoulies.

>>723326890
This is absolutely true though I would have worded it differently.

When I was a child, I dreamed of being a writer, an artist/animator, a biologist. Then I graduated highschool and had to ask myself the question "what would my future look like if I picked one of those dreams and followed it to fruition" and the answer is "unemployed, unfuckable and living with my parents".

Today I'm married and make six figures doing a couple tickets a day in my pajamas working from home as a senior IT guy for a warehouse. Thank god I picked IT, in hindsight it really was the only valid option.