Gregg Mayles, the director of Sea of Thieves and designer on Donkey Kong Country, has announced that he’s left Rare. News of Mayles’ exit in July 2025 during a across Xbox Games Studios, but the short poem he today makes it official.
With a 36-year tenure at the studio, Mayles saw its transition from an exclusive Nintendo partner to a Microsoft subsidiary. He helped design games like Battletoads, created Banjo-Kazooie and when studio founders Tim and Chris Stamper left in 2007, stepped up and became Rare’s creative director. Mayles also led the team behind Sea of Thieves, one of Rare’s modern successes.
The studio has been supporting Sea of Thieves with new content since it was released in 2018, but was also working on a new project, Everwild, that was . The game went through a troubled development process over the last few years, and Rare with Mayles taking over as director. Microsoft’s decision to cancel the game and layoff staff at the studio this summer is likely one of the reasons he left.
Losing Mayles is just one example of Microsoft’s self-inflicted wounds from 2025. The company not only made cuts at and Forza Motorsport developer , it also increased the prices of both Xbox consoles and Game Pass Ultimate. All of these changes are seemingly in service of shifting the Xbox business into something that’s more focused on subscriptions and game publishing, but the transition definitely seems like a painful one.
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