No one is talking about one of the best news that Xbox's purchase of Activision will leave us: we will recover one of my favorite studios

Buried in support for the Call of Duty series, the guys at Raven Software have plenty of talent in their ranks.

When a franchise gets to a certain pace with which they want to be competitive by pooling the talent of many studios under one umbrella, misfortunes sometimes happen. For example, when Electronic Arts wanted to compete with Call of Duty head-to-head for the war shooter cake, it decided to put many of its studios to help DICE: that caused such sad things as removing the always great Criterion from the speed games and put them to help with the behavior of vehicles in your star FPS. This was in response to an Activision that, as we say, maintained a hellish rate of annual deliveries with the CoD saga, something that led to the alternation of studies and having an infinite number of support teams for multiplayer, zombies or specific aspects of the gameplay. ...one of them was Raven Software.

Operation: Save Raven

This is not intended to be a profile of Raven Software, firstly because the article is not about that, and secondly because that was already done on these pages by the much more talented Marc Rollan with his piece on Raven Software that we published a little longer ago. half a year This piece revolves around the possibilities that Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard offers the North American team to regain the pulse of the individual releases that they have already lost.

It all started back in 2010, when the team joined the war franchise to help out with certain tasks in the otherwise great Call of Duty: Black Ops. It would be the beginning of the end for the studio's solo projects, and since then its work has been limited solely and exclusively to this series. It is said soon, right? A studio as fecund as they have only been in Call of Duty for over a decade.

The truth is that many things have happened for that to happen, of course. On the one hand, Activision has been getting rid of everything that were not its most successful franchises. From being a company that released risky projects like Destiny, Prototype or Blur to accompany its most successful franchises, to focusing almost exclusively on Guitar Heroes, Skylanders or Call of Duty themselves... in the last five years, from In fact, his only baggage beyond the usual annual installments of his star brand of war shooters (beyond a few remasters) have been occasional projects that were sure-fire hits like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Crash Bandicoot: It's About Time.

The other problem we face in making this dream come true has to do with the fact that Raven had two consecutive failures... In fact, so consecutive that not even a year separates them. On the one hand, the quite forgettable Wolfenstein from 2009, an attempt to revive the saga that didn't go well, and, on the other hand, the much more interesting Singularity: which, yes, didn't sell much either. There also comes another problem, and that is that this is the time when middle-class video games began to dwindle alarmingly.

How can Raven be affected by Microsoft?

At the beginning of 2022, it was Bloomberg who reported that Microsoft executives intended to take a breather from the annual rate of Call of Duty deliveries, and that opens one of the two doors that have to be unlocked for the dream of many to come true. and the authors of games as absolutely brilliant as Hexen, Heretic, Soldier of Fortune or the unfairly forgotten X-Men Origins: Wolverine that dominates the article from above.

The first thing is that this desire of the executives is confirmed and the pressure of the CoD wheel on all the studies involved is loosened. I remember watching in amazement the number of teams parading across the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 launch screen, a truly endless number that could be shortened with more flexible timing. This, of course, could free up a Raven a bit, who, yes, would have to rebuild herself and that is that she suffered multiple layoffs when her solo projects turned out to be serious setbacks and that she has not stopped having casualties until recently.

On the other hand, the profile of video games that Raven made: great titles, but far from the blockbuster caliber that prevails now, does not seem to fit with the industry... does it? Just a few weeks ago I published an article about Microsoft's new model to unstoppably feed Xbox Game Pass, a careful mix of big "blockbusters" like the new Forza Motorsport or Starfield, seasoned with some agreements with third parties and with, and this is what interests us, also games of great artistic value but of a lesser prism like Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Grounded or, why not, the new from Raven Software.

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