Rare Hit by Layoffs

It seems that Rare, one of the major developers for games revolving around Microsoft's Kinect peripheral, who have made recent titles Kinect Sports and Kinect Sports Rivals have been hit hard by the software giant's move away from mandatory Kinect units which had been cause for an uncertain future as reported earlier as roughly 20 staff have been let go.

The layoffs have included long term studio members including lead programmer Chris Sutherland who had worked on Battletoads and Banjo Kazooie and artist Gavin Price who had worked on Viva Pinata!. Microsoft, who own Rare, confirmed layoffs and upcoming restructuring in a recent statement.

"At Xbox, our goal is to constantly create new fun, social and interactive entertainment experiences. As part of Rare's commitment to this goal, we have made a decision to change our development process and methodology at Rare to best support our future projects, this has led to us reviewing the skills and the makeup of our development teams in our business. Rare continues to invest in our people and future projects."

Coming so soon after the recent Kinect news this action seems to indicate that Microsoft is distancing itself from the peripheral that was, at one point, mandatory for the console to function despite lacking support from much of the development community. The aforementioned change of how Rare studios operates may make those who remember Rare's more critically acclaimed titles such as Perfect Dark and Donkey Kong hopeful for a return to that style of development, but with the loss of key and long term staff the future of Rare looks uncertain.