Whats the real story with Nintendo dumping Rare

[Solidstate]

Reading Nintendo's press release it seems like there has been a big falling out to make them sell their 49% of Rare.

There are a number of questions here

1) Why has it taken Rare so long to bring a GC game out?
2) Will they ever bring them out now? I have my doubts. If Rare were going to release 4 or 5 games in the next few months I am sure that Nintendo would like to get a cut of the profits on those games. For Nintendo to drop them now just before the big Christmas period makes you think that there now aren't any Rare games coming out on Nintendo platforms at all. Even if Nintendo were pissed for some reason, they would be better to sell Rare during next summer's games lull after they capitalised on one last xmas.
3) If Microsoft are the buyers then will they let any Rare games get released on GC even ones that are 99% complete - I doubt it. They need all the exclusives they can get.

So to sum up - don't expect to see any Rare games any time soon unless you also own an Xbox.

But the question remains - what the hell happened? Nintendo and Rare always seemed so cushy - they seemed the perfect match. If Rare are just chasing big $$$ signs they will just end up being Microsoft's bitch. "You have to release Dinosaur Planet 6 by October - I don't care if it isn't finished properly - we own you, you do as you're told". "As far as that racing game goes just replace Donkey Kong with Bubsy the Bobcat and you can release the game next week - whats the problem".

The end of an Era.

[ABCMan]

Rare hadnt made a decent game in 2 years, they went to nintendo asking them to buy out the whole company, but most of the top programmers had already left (after goldeneye) so rare was a second party development house with an almost unknown team of programmers who were struggling to produce the games they had promised several top projects were canned others fell way behind schedule and nintendo didnt want to buy out rare.

Nintendo had a small but significant policy change last year, which was to be a first party developer, but to also encourage more third party developers into the fold by giving them "development budgets" (like with square and namco) this policy is proving its worth and with exclusives coming from these third party's second party developers were not needed.

Microsoft on the other hand was looking into the abyss with its failing console with poor quality games and huge losses on its console division it neede a "big name" developer to try to prop up the console, they had had some limited success by buying in developers as they have no in house programming talent (so to speak) they have to rely totaly on second party developers to provide them with their exclusive games. thus rare looked like a good buy.

Nintendo will simply use the vast amount of money they got from the sale of its stock in rare to add to its sweetener fund for third party developers (word is that rockstar games are about to recieve some "development help").

So what is to come from rare, well expect to see the last few gc/gba games to still turn up for xmas but also dont expect rares usual standard, it will take rare 6 months to develop/convert over to being a m$ software house so the xmas sales of gc games will keep that going till then, HOWEVER you can be certain that anything rare do release on the gc will have sections removed or lower quality graphics than they should have, this will ensure that once conversions are complete to xbox it will have versions that are bigger and look better (again by alowing poor quality releases on the gc it makes the xbox appear to be a better console, it may even fool a few people).

The gba side is very different, microsoft are themselves a gba third party developer so expect to see nintendo character free gba games still coming out from rare with little or no change to the current schedule (except the names)