Microsoft Buys Rare

Phwoar writes "Microsoft have announced their buyout of the games developer Rare. After a $375 million payoff Rare will now produce games solely for the Xbox. After Rare's recent releases for the Nintendo systems bombed, Nintendo decided to sell their 49% stake in the company last week rather than buy the company themselves. Google News has a nice collection of links to articles regarding the announcement." You might be reminded of Microsoft's purchase of Bungie a few years ago.

Re:Primates

[Anonymous Coward]

donkey-kong is trademarked by nintendo, they just licensed rare to make the game -- there will be no dk on xbox

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, except Nintendo owns the rights to Donkey Kong, Star Fox, and many of the other titles Rare has worked on since they became a second party. Microsoft even had to pay extra money for the rights to Banjo Kazooie and Perfect Dark.

Re:No Great Loss

[morgajel]

if you read up on the release, nintendo kept a lot of IP, including the rights to some of their classics like donkey kong, etc.

the legacy of nintendo titles is just that- a legacy... not really an asset.

Re:This was unexpected....

[Ryan Amos]

What are you talking about Nintendo going under? You seem to forget Nintendo's main cash cow-- the Gameboy. They have no serious competition here and this is the most popular console ever (I still count it as the same console because I can play the copy of Tetris I got in 1989 on my GBA.) Even if the GC totally flops (which it's not, they're not #1 but they're a solid #2) Nintendo still has the GBA to fall back on. I, for one, would not cry if the big N moved to be a software-only company.

Re:If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.

[Tim Browse]

As some guy from MS pointed out when asked about the HD reliability of the XBox, he reckoned the DVD drives used in current generation consoles (XBox, PS2, GC) were the most likely point of failure. The hard drive was definitely lower down his list of things to worry about.

Shrug.

Tim

Re:Sad day for nintendo fans

[cyb3r0ptx]

The only good game that is due for GCN from Rare is Starfox Adventures. First-party games that overshadow any recent Rare developments are Pikmin, Mario Sunshine, Animal Crossing, Metroid, Zelda..

And let's not forget that Capcom has given Nintendo the sole rights to the Resident Evil series. There are a ton of good games available now and some in the pipeline, so this news doesn't bother me as a GCN owner.

Re:Bungie, Rare, ... Sega

[CondeZer0]

> I think the obvious next move is for Microsoft to buy Sega.
They already have tried:
http://www.redherring.com/insider/2002/0716/sega07 1602.html [redherring.com]

And after that they tried to buy Nintendo for 25Bn(I think to remember 2.5Bn,
but in the news sites I found it says 25Bn!):
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1131308 [vnunet.com]
http://gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=263 [gameinfowire.com]

I don't remember much, I just found this links by looking in google for less
than one minute, I'm sure you can find some better info elsewhere in the net.

My favorite part of this history is the answer of Nintendo: "We weren't sure
what to think when Microsoft made the offer. In fact I was surprised - we
didn't need the money. I thought it was a joke."

hehehe...

I wonder what will they try next, it's obvious that they are desperate for
finding some other business now that the software licensing is going to become
obsolete thanks to opensource, I think they should stick to what(only) they are
good at: mouses ;)

\\Uriel

It's NEW news....only recently became OFFICIAL

[dolphin558]

I have been submitting stories on this for the past week but they have been based on rumors. Only NOW did MS release the press statement. Slashdot was right not to post stories based on rumors of MS buying Rare.

Re:that doesn't mean they'll produce good games

[Yorrike]

No. Selling 100,000 copies would garner $5million gross at the retail level. When you buy a $50 game, the money does not get put in the shop's till and then given directly to MS next time their rep comes in.

I believe the game companies make between $5 and $10 on each $50 game. In order for MS to make $5million, they need to sell more than 700,000 copies (that is, of course, disregarding the loss they incure with every sale of an Xbox). In order to make the $375 million Rare cost them, they must sell somewhere in the order of 60 million games (this is still disregarding the loss on every Xbox). Rare cost Microsoft way too much.

Good one Nintendo. You pulled a fast one.

Re:If this is not "anti-competitive", then what is

[spectecjr]

not saying that SONY would not, if they had the money to do it -- oh wait, they DO have the money to buy a couple outside developers just for shits and giggles, but didn't.

What kind of crack are you smoking, exactly?

Nintendo bought Rare, as well as a few other houses.

Sony bought Psygnosis (Wipeout), Square (Final Fantasy; major shareholder), Polyphony Digital (the guys who did Gran Turismo), Incog (Twisted Metal), Verant (Everquest), Red Zone (989 Sports), Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot), The Station (Online game center), RTIME Inc. (online game infrastructure company), Millennium (Medievil), Arc Entertainment Inc., Sugar and Rockets Inc. (Kurushi), and Contrail Inc.
(Wild Arms).

So, I guess Sony's customers are suffering because of this game buy out thing?

Or do you still claim that sony DIDN'T do this?

Re:that doesn't mean they'll produce good games

[tc]

Er, no. MS probably make somewhere in the region of $5 to $10 for every Xbox game sold in licencing fees. That's regardless of whether they are the developer or publisher of that title. In the case where they are both developer and publisher (as is now the case with Rare titles) the revenue per title is more likely to be in the $20 to $25 per unit range.

Rare's titles have sold an average of around 1.4 million each throughout their history. Let's suppose they manage to do half that in future. Revenue for MS from each Rare title might therefore be around the $14-21M range.

Suppose Rare ship another 5 titles over the lifetime of the Xbox. That's getting up to $100M in revenue. Now factor in the extra bonus of having more quality titles on Xbox - which should increase console sales and therefore revenue for all other games sales. Suddenly, it looks like MS's increased revenue as a result of the purchase might be quite substantial, and the purchase price of $375M looks like not a bad deal at all.

Re:Split ownership

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, it's a representation of a Nintendo trademarked franchise. Nintendo has absolutely no reason to pay anything to Rare or Microsoft if they want to make a new sequel.

Uhh No.. Nintendo owns ALL DK trademarks.

[Viewsonic]

Anything related to "Donkey Kong", 3D or no, is owned 100% by Nintendo. The only way you will see Donkey Kong on an XBox is if Nintendo allows it. (Not likely)

Rare lately has been making total crap games. It was a waste of $$ for MS to even buy them.

Re:that doesn't mean they'll produce good games

[edwdig]

Dig around at any GameCube website and you'll find that Rare was the first company outside of Nintendo to get GameCube dev kits.

The whole point of the sale was so the owners could get out of it and retire. They offered to sell the company to Nintendo first, but they decided they weren't worth the money, hence the sale to Microsoft.

Re:rare's best game

[Explo]

and one they should update for the XBOX..... R/C Pro-AM!!!! :)

IMO Rare's best game was Underwurlde [ultimate-wurlde.com], produced when they were still called Ultimate and produced games for 8-bit computers. ;) Sabre Wulf [ultimate-wurlde.com] was not bad either, and I guess Knight Lore [ultimate-wurlde.com] was pretty good, but I never saw it. All these games were mentioned on rareware.com, but sadly the information seems to have disappeared since. But you can get all that information on the Ultimate-Wurlde [ultimate-wurlde.com] and get either nostalgic, enlightened about history or just plain bored. ;)

The Sega Saturn was inferrior.

[Inoshiro]

The PSX had an internal MPEG decoder (allowing higher-quality, fullscreen playback of MPEG files than the SH2-bound softdecoding the Sega Saturn used), a 3D acceleration engine based around triangles instead of quads. Its SH2 CPUs were slower (even if there were two of them, not all games took advantage of SMP), and its overall MIPS level was lover than than of the PSX. It was also very hard to program for, as the SMP locking was beyond most game programmers, or wasn't really as beneficial as Sega had hoped. A shame, because the SMP parts were more expensive to build -- which led to Sega losing money on each unit.

The PSX won because of its games, possible because 3rd party people had an easy-to-use developer kit which provided easy MPEG playback for cut scenes, an easier to write for 3D engine (triangles vs. quads againt, remember the NV1? It failed because it was quad-based), and because it was easier to write UMP games than SMP ones (although Yu had Virtua Fighter running with each processor computing one of the players' characters, this was the exception).

Sometimes, superior systems do win even if people seem to think something else was superior (although the PS2 is another discussion ;)).

Re:If this is not "anti-competitive", then what is

[pastie]

..., Square (Final Fantasy; major shareholder), ...

At least in this case, they were buying into the company to help them out of the sticky situation they got themselves into by making a poor and very expensive film, which put Square into dire financial difficulties. Can't blame Sony for that, IMHO :)