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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.
When Microsoft bought Bungie, it was to buy a "killer app" for the X-Box and nerf it's simultaneous PC development for fear it would show up the X-Box.
Rare on the other hand has a whole one game announced and a legacy of Nintendo titles. Ultimately, it's just another shot fired in the console wars, rather than a loss to PC gaming, this time.
I would buy an X-Box, knowing Bill loses as much money as I spend on each one sold - but he has more money than me and so is going to win that war.
375 million? i think they paid that much just for the prestige of owning a previously successful game company. Now after they pay the cost to switching to the xbox development environment, they got to produce something worthwhile. I dunno about you, but 375 million is difficult to live up to. I think the idea it total garbage on microsoft's part.
Fact is, beside the lack of games and the silly controller, the Xbox is a superior system. If you have ever played one you would know. The graphics on the PS2 just can't come anywhere close to the Xbox. The built in hard drive is a brilliant feature. It has an MP3 (or maybe it's WMA) ripper built in, as well as the ability to play your MP3s in certain games. It's got built in networking. People also like to bitch about how you have to buy a remote to watch DVDs on the Xbox. But with the PS2 you have to buy a network adapter to play online, a multitap for 4 player games, and a memory card just to be able to save.
Quit dissing the Xbox. It actually is pretty cool, even if it is from Microsoft.
Call me nuts, but no matter how great the graphics are, if they don't have any games I want to play, I don't really care.
I'm willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of graphics quality for games with good gameplay, stories, variety, etc.
And as far as having a hard drive, that's a main reason that I didn't buy an X-Box. Your X-Box is gonna die loooong before my PS2. In case you've never owned a computer, the hard drive is *always* the weakest point.
Fact is, beside the lack of games and the silly controller, the Xbox is a superior system.
Hmm.. and what, perchance, do the people who purchase console systems use the most?
Here's a hint: graphics != gameplay
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
I think that the Xbox, for all of it's bells and whistles, just isn't that solid of a system. I have not seen any title on the Xbox that had graphics so compelling to persuade me to declare that the Xbox is the top graphical powerhouse. It is all about how much memory developers can use, how easy it is to program for, and how many special gimmicks you can get out of the system.
For example, the little GameCube has cranked out a few graphically amazing and all out awe inspiring titles with Mario Sunshine, the Resident Evil remake, and Animal Crossing. Resident Evil has the best graphics that I have seen in a new generation game. Mario Sunshine is amazingly complex, big, and fun. Animal Crossing is just fun as hell to play, innovatiuve with it's real time clock and animal people that remember things, and interactive capabilities with the Gameboy Advance.
The majority of game players, myself included, had jumped the gun on the GameCube and declared that it would never have any kind of real potential. We were proved wrong. A lot of people, myself included, origionally touted the Xbox as the premiere system once it hit. Well, it turned out to be not all that great (comparatively) after all.
P.S. we are sick and tired of hearing about Halo. It ain't all that.
The thing is, when you are Microsoft with a monopoly-built legacy operating system, everything looks like a "blank" PC. And if that blank PC doesn't have a hard drive, damn it, we're going to add one so that we can stuff our OS on it. :)
Fact is, beside the lack of games...
Case rested.
I think we've been over this already in other threads - buying an X-Box to screw over Microsoft is not a good idea. Reasons:
1) The amount of money Microsoft loses per machine is unknown right now, but the number has probably shrunk considerably from initial estimates made a year ago due to economy of scale.
2) Microsoft has a LOT of money in cash. They can afford to lose a few billion if they think it's in their long-term good.
3) In the long-term, Microsoft selling a lot of X-Boxes that nobody buys games for could screw them over...But in the short-term if X-Box hardware sales suddenly spiked, developers would assume that gamers were buying these X-Boxes. That would make more developers make X-Box games, which would make more actual gamers buy the X-Box, which would increase X-Box games sales, which would help Microsoft take over the video game console market long-term.
There's a lot of crap out there in the console wars. People treat what they bought as if it's a religious stance. If I drink Coke over Pepsi, I don't treat it as a victory of good over evil; I just like the taste better. I think the 3 systems all have strong points. I don't think any are run by mom and pop shops, so none of them gets a sympathy card for not being a faceless corporation. That said, I have an xbox and I prefer it to the others. Sony pissed me off when the Ps2 first came out and I couldn't get one. I couldn't help but think that part of the shortage was a marketing ploy to drive up demand. Paranoid or not, it led me to buy a dreamcast instead (for $99), which I never regretted. While I'd like to play grand theft auto at some point, that's about the only thing that the PS2 has gamewise that I'd consider buying the system for, and that's not enough. The cross-platform titles all come to xbox, and consistently are better on that platform (check out ign; they do comparisons all the time). The titles I'm interested in, like good first person shooters and sports games, are on xbox. Hate to beat a dead horse but I've never found a console shooter to be as good through and through as halo. Just my opinion, but there it is. I think the hard drive is a great asset. Not having to mess with memory cards sounds like a small thing but once you've used it, you wonder why you'd ever have to handle saving any other way. I used to juggle between 4 cards on my dreamcast and it was a pain in the ass. Listening to your own music while playing games in also fantastic. I start to look down on games that don't offer this feature. A lot of people bash the xbox because they think the console they bought is some sort of religious expression or something, or they hate Microsoft. Well, a console is just a console, and if it does what you want better than others, offers more for you money than others, looks and sounds better than other, and plays more of the games that you want than others, then that's probably a good console for you. It's totally up to the individual of course, so there's no way to objectively say what is the best console. I just wish people would calm down a little and not act like their like or dislike of a console has any real meaning to the rest of the world.
Brilliant. Let's all bankrupt MS by giving them $200 and inflating the sales figures that they show to developers and investors. That'll learn 'em!
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
Please, people, stop saying "they're abusing their power of monopoly!" Nintendo and Sony have been kicking the crap out of MS in the console arena. They can play the same marketing games that everyone else does as long as their console isn't most of the console market.
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
I don't know that I would say the Dreamcast didn't "win." No, it didn't earn Sega huge chunks of money, and it didn't smack around the PS2, but I don't know that the PS2 was really its main target; it came out inbetween the game between the PSX/N64/Saturn generation systems and the GC/PS2/Xbox generation.
;-)
It also doesn't have the largest library of games, but it does have a number of truly great ones; in fact, games for it are still trickling out in Japan. Thousands of people still play Phantasy Star Online on a daily basis, plus DCs have no type of copy protection that prevents them from running burned CDs (at least, all but the last model of the DC), they're very popular in the indie developer scene. I can play MP3s, VCDs, and DivX files on mine, as well as play SNES and PSX games through emulators; or, if you want, you can put Linux on it and have a low-end server.
So I don't suppose I would say the DC "won" in the sense of winning the console war, but it didn't lose at all.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
I always find it funny when someone thinks they are so insightful and important, then they get to have their own ignorance thrown back in their face. Naughty Dog, Incog, Red Zone, Psygnosis, etc. How many game developers would you like me to list that Sony has purchased?
Let me guess - it's not "dirty tactics" when they do it, right?
When Microsoft bought Bungie, it was to buy a "killer app" for the X-Box and nerf it's simultaneous PC development for fear it would show up the X-Box.
Throwing away money to assure exclusivity, same as with their acquisition of rights to FASA's BattleTech video game development (IP value, if nothing else... too bad they don't roll out Ralph Reed's BattleMech!)
Rare on the other hand has a whole one game announced and a legacy of Nintendo titles. Ultimately, it's just another shot fired in the console wars, rather than a loss to PC gaming, this time.
More good money after bad. Seems apparent, to me, that without their monopoly they couldn't shoot fish in a berrel. I can't recall where I've seen this strategy of spending money like crazy on to prop up a dying horse, but I do recall it's unusual in the extreme to see it succeed. They're hemmoraging cash and the estimates (from CNN) are they'll get 1.5 million units into the Europe-Middle East-Africa market, and Sony/Nintendo will cover the remaining sales of 12.7 million units.
IMHO Sony and Nintendo are smarter to leave much game development out of house, in the hands of garage developers everywhere, which fosters more creativity than:
It's practically a guarranteed failure.
What next? Steve Balmer running around on a stage, getting all sweaty and telling us how great the new X-Box Solitaire is? Actually, that might sell...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
1. Now all of a sudden a lot of really good games that may have been produced and released on different platforms are only going to be for the X-Box. I was hoping to see the PS2 doing a sequel to Perfect Dark or Conker's but I guess that won't happen.
2. This is EXACTLY what Microsoft needs for the floundering X-Box. So far the machine has had only a handful of decent games that are exclusive to the machine, and a whole lot being developed for all platforms. If I own a PS2, why should I bother getting an X-Box for a game that is available on my machine? The more imaginative developers jump on to the X-Box bandwagon (or in this case are lassoed and pulled onto the bandwagon) the better it is for the platform.
Whether any of this is a good thing I guess remains to be seen. Considering that nothing spectacular has been heard to be coming from Rare (at least any time soon), maybe this won't make a difference worth mentioning. Anywho, just my 2c. Agree or disagree?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
We now might say that the probability of having those games ported to linux will be .. rare
______
One day your head will be your box, your brain will be your client, and all energetic problems will be solved...
Also this adds up. MS will need over 1 billion PER YEAR just to keep XBox alive.