One of the big surprises of the Xbox reorganisation announcement this week was that legendary studio Rare was being transitioned to Activision rather than remaining under the Xbox Game Studios banner, effective immediately.
This doesn't mean a whole lot on the face of it — Rare remains an Xbox-owned studio and the money will continue filtering in to Microsoft — but the company will supposedly report to Activision rather than Xbox Game Studios directly.
It's also been mentioned in a report by The Game Business this week that Rare is working on "other projects" beyond just Sea of Thieves right now, although none of these are public information as far as we're aware. The most recent game from Rare that we knew about was Everwild, which was cancelled back in 2025.
"Rare is behind Sea of Thieves. The pirate game has been a decent success, but it has been declining over the last few years. In 2025, Rare’s Everwild project was cancelled, which led to some redundancies. However, the studio was able to mitigate that by cutting back on outsourcing, and moving staff onto Sea of Thieves. As a result of its Activision move, there have been a few cuts to Rare’s central operations team. The studio is working on other projects."
The video version of this Game Business report states that "it will be down to Activision to decide whether those projects continue", and we assume there'll be some kind of evaluation process taking place very soon (if not already).
As the outlet mentions though, Rare is a "unique studio in Microsoft’s portfolio" with an incredible legacy that can be tapped into more efficiently than we've seen in the past. They highlight that there are more Rare games on Evercade systems than on Steam, for example, and as much as we love Evercade, that's still a weird thing to hear!
The obvious IP that many people think Rare should return to is Banjo-Kazooie, and considering Activision's history with the likes of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, maybe it'd be a good fit. Whatever ends up happening, we're just hopeful that Rare can finally follow-up Sea of Thieves and put some more amazing games into the market in years to come.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.purexbox.com/news/2026/09/report-xbox-studio-rare-working-on-various-projects-but-activision-will-decide-their-future
