Rare’s having some of their best ever success yet, with strong retail performance for Sea of Thieves and a successful GaaS tail.
You’ve also carefully omitted Playground games, Turn 10, Coalition, Obsidian and of course Mojang. Not to mention the inside looks we’ve gotten from Ninja Theory and Double Fine.
Rare was almost killed by Microsoft's push to turn them into their Kinect and New Xbox Experience studio. The fact that they got to make Sea of Thieves at all is surprising but let's not forget that the game was
absolute shit at launch and took almost two full years of updates to become their "best ever success". That is hardly a statement of quality, especially from a studio that once had a large stable of very popular IPs.
Playground Games and Turn 10 are the only consistent performers of the bunch, and all they do are Forza games. I won't include Fable until it actually arrives. Right now, these two studios do one thing and one thing only. Turn 10 hasn't put out a game in
six years. The Coalition has only made two Gears games. Obsidian has done almost nothing for Microsoft since their acquisition except for Grounded -- Obsidian's biggest/best work is still Fallout New Vegas and The Outer Worlds, with no ETA on Outer Worlds 2.
You can play defense force as much as you want, it doesn't change reality. Microsoft has a
twenty year history of mismanagement of studios (and third party exclusivity arrangements; see: Mistwalker Studios). The amount of IPs they have now is
nothing compared to what they could have had if they had fostered the talent and studios they had during their OG Xbox and early Xbox 360 days. Instead, they got overly focused on Halo, Gears, Forza and trend-chasing with Kinect.
Crimson Skies, MechAssault, Shadowrun, Project Gotham Racing, Fuzion Frenzy, Quantum Redshift, Blinx, Kameo, Viva Pinata, Banjo-Kazooie... just a few IPs that were sacrificed so Xbox could focus on the dudebros and trying to copy Nintendo's success with the Wii.
It was actually an Activision studio.
It wasn't an Activision studio until Microsoft stopped working with them because they didn't want PGR competing against Forza.
Thanks for showing me you don't know shit about what you're talking about and can safely be ignored.