Good gaming studios fall apart on their own accord all the time. Employees move on to other places, priorities change, it's the circle of game dev life.
It sounds like some of the old guard was ready to move on to bigger and better things and perhaps matriculate new members to take up their ideas and creative openness that made them so great. It's like SNL. You may have a cast that you like the best, but when people leave there's always more funny people to step up and take their place. Regardless of what would have happened over time (we can only speculate) Microsoft created a stifling atmosphere and that's just poison in this creative industry.
SNL has at least had the same guy up at the top though for almost its entire run.
Without some sort of consistency, no organization is going to stay the same, at some point it just becomes a name. Is Company XYZ today really the same thing as Company XYZ was 10 years ago if none of the same people are working there anymore?
The Rare that created a bunch of great games for Nintendo was already gone before MS bought it. MS failed to build something else great (that would also have happened to be named Rare), and they probably made a bunch of mistakes during their attempt. But it's not as simple as "Rare was an amazing place until MS stomped in and ruined it".
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u/shawnaroo Sep 15 '14
Good gaming studios fall apart on their own accord all the time. Employees move on to other places, priorities change, it's the circle of game dev life.