You must have missed the FOUR non Kinect IP's Microsoft let them work on this gen alone. You tell me one studio this gen that has worked on that many different IP's this gen. I assure you the list will be very short and won't include any studios from Sony.

The way I see it, working on kinect is a lot better than being jobless like Zipper and. Sony Liverpool ex staffers. Instead of making RARE work on the same IP's that weren't commercially successful, they flipped and changed the formula until something viable stuck.

Better than making a bunch of wipeouts only to be shut down, they worked on a total of FIVE IP's this gen until they struck Gold.

I think this is probably true, the real Rare disapeared a long time ago.

Who said Microsoft cancelled them? Maybe Rare themselves weren't happy with where those games were going? It could be down to a whole load of different factors.

I actually liked Viva Pinata.

Because they are with Microsoft, everyone expects them to make certain types of games, and they give them flack when they aren't "HARDCORE".

If Viva Pinata came out on the Wii it would have gotten praise. If Nuts and Bolts came out on the Wii, it would have gotten praise and the headlines would read "RARE is back!!".

They can't win for losing.

Used to play those, Some great times I had :)

I even have the first viva on PC(Which will become defective once GFWL shuts down...).

They went from casual to casual. What are you talking about?

What are you talking about. That studio has always done the casual side (except for a few notable examples being the getaway series, which was more the soho team side, and some old sports games). That studio has being doing casual stuff since the beginning (1998 spice world game) . The last we heard of the more "core" side of things was eight days which was cancelled and they released gangs of London in 2006. They are more of a casual studio that does (rarely) "core" games on the side

Uh what the hell you are talking about . London studio has been the casual oriented one for most of its life . They mostly did stuff like mentioned above and Buzz or Singstar .

Pretty much their only known core stuff were Porsche Challenge and a Tetaway game eons ago and years apart from each other . It's their casual stuff that made them known

Or are we going to pretend people noticed those Nba and football games from their early days and actuall miss them ?

These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse

Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.

They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.

If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.

It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie

Yeah with FSR 5 they should be able to offer a much cheaper version of Helix.

Series S is what has killed Xbox Series so... Will they dare?

The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.

Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.

Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.

LucasRuinedChildhood,

For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:

1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.

2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".