[Xplune13]

Rare did go down after acquisition, but what others are you talking about? Their biggest (Zenimax) one will start releasing new Xbox and PC exclusive games from this year onwards, so it's still early to call that one a failure.

Mojang, is doing Mojang thing i.e. Minecraft and while they haven't had a great success after that, they're still doing fine.

Playground games is doing Forza which is actually pretty popular among racing players (perhaps the most popular).

Obsidian haven't started to make Xbox and PC exclusives yet, but they'll also start with that presumably next year.

I don't know where you're getting "Most of Microsoft's acquisitions in recent years have been failures." this.

On the other hand, Sony's way of buying studios is way different. Most of the times, they have already worked with those studios in past to make a PS exclusive and then they buy them. I agree that Insomniac is doing great (better than any of Microsoft's purchases), but other than that, there isn't much just like MS.

I think we will get a better picture of whose acquisitions work best after 5-6 more years.

[monocasa]

And frankly, Rare was a shadow of it's former self at acquisition anyway. There were still some a couple of the people left who worked on the games that made Rare famous (e.g. Ken Lobb, Grant Kirkhope), but it had a huge amount of brain drain around the early 2000s that left it in a state to be one of the first game dev studios to be picked up on the cheap by Microsoft. Nintendo want interested in supporting it, and it probably just would have went under if not for Microsoft.

[DizzyDoo]

Other one would be Double Fine, while it is relatively early days since they were acquired in 2019, they seem to have been just working on their projects since then. Psychonauts 2 was very well received last year - from what I've read it seems like the Microsoft acquisition allowed them to add a bunch of content back into the game that they had previously cut for time/budget, like boss battles - looks like it helped with the overall game quality.

[baud147258]

> Obsidian haven't started to make Xbox and PC exclusives yet, but they'll also start with that presumably next year.

Didn't they released Grounded, exclusive to PC and xbox in 2020? Though since it's a survival game, people might not remember it's been developed by them.

[Xplune13]

Yes they did, but it's still an early access game, so I don't know if it counts a a fully developed release.

[kupopuffs]

Ensemble, FASA, Lionhead Studios, Access, Digital Anvil

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

[Goronmon]

I don't know if I would classify 15-25 years ago as "recent years"...

[notbaab]

Did rare go down after acquisition? I'm young so maybe I don't remember what the glory days of rare were but Rare with Microsoft produced Viva Pinata, banjo kazooie nuts and bolts, and sea of thieves. Sea of thieves did have some trouble at launch but it has grown into quite a great game. Viva piñata is highly revered and nuts and bolts is also loved, even if it wasn't a banjo kazooie platformer.