Rare appears to have become caught up in Microsoft's round of layoffs today, and the developer's long-running project Everwild also seems to have been canceled, according to a new report.
Per VGC, Everwild, which hasn't been heard from in some time (barring a somewhat vague update from Xbox boss Phil Spencer earlier this year), has been shut down. Additionally, employees at Rare are "likely to lose their jobs" (that's VGC's wording, but the publication is citing "people with knowledge of the project").
It's all part of a massive round of layoffs at Microsoft that began earlier today, with Candy Crush studio King and Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax already affected by job cuts. Other studios, like Rare, were widely expected to enter Microsoft's crosshairs as part of these cuts.
Although Everwild is almost certainly one of the victims of this layoff wave, which could see upwards of 9,000 employees losing their jobs, it hasn't been without its own troubles in the past as well.
The game was originally announced all the way back in 2019 with a rather evocative trailer, albeit one that didn't show too much in the way of concrete gameplay.
That would turn out to be a consistent theme with Everwild; another trailer was shown during the Xbox event in July 2020, and while it was certainly visually striking, it once again failed to show exactly what kind of game Everwild would be.
Between then and now, Xbox didn't say much about Everwild at all, but rumors swirled that the game's development had essentially been rebooted, suggesting that Rare and Xbox weren't entirely sure in which direction they wanted to take their latest project.
It's hard to say whether Everwild would have been granted more of a reprieve were these layoffs not being put into effect. Its lengthy, seemingly troubled development gives the impression of a game that nobody was quite sure about, so it may well have ended up falling by the wayside anyway.
In any case, with Everwild now dead, Rare doesn't have another publicly-announced project in the works. Xbox doesn't seem to be shuttering the studio (for now, at least; there's certainly past form in this area), so we'll just have to wait and see what happens next.
