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Rare Still Leery of Downloadable Content
GamesIndustry.biz reports on comments by Rare lead designer Gregg Mayles, who has gone on record saying that Rare will only do downloadable content if there is a need. The popularity of their Viva Piñata title notwithstanding, the company has no interest in making content if there is no interest. From the article: "'We've got plenty of ideas for what we can do with downloadable content because Piñata is such a unique game ... But the jury is still out.' However, the team does still see the potential of Xbox Live and the push for downloadable content, with Viva Piñata offering interaction between players over the service. 'That vision of sending Piñata to each other was around before Xbox Live even existed. That's why [Viva Piñata] began life on a handheld PDA device because we wanted one machine that could communicate with another,' revealed Mayles."
There's a reason Nintendo dumped them...
Well, the main reason was that Rare stopped filling the role that Nintendo needed them to fill and Nintendo was moving away from the 'Second Party' model. Rare was needed by Nintendo in order to supply their systems with several high quality games every year in order to keep consumer interest high, which was something they did fairly well up until about 1998 or so; late in the N64 generation many Rare games were taking 24-36 months to complete in an age where a long development cycle was 18 months. When Nintendo passed on buying Rare Perfect Dark Zero had been in development for 12 months, Kameo for 18 and both of those games were only released in 2005 (meaning they were in development for 5+ years).
Rare is still a good developer with lots of talent, the problem is their management structure needs a serious change
Their problem was they paid $375,000,000 for the talent. The problem was the talent left. Rare got worse because all their decent developers left or were on the way out. It would've been smart to give key people some stakes in the success of Rare. That obviously didn't happen.
Rare's original IP (Conker, Perfect Dark) is in no way worth $375,000,000.
I don't know how much Microsoft paid for Bungie, but I guarantee you it was a better deal than Rare.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.