Playtonic Games is not joining Xbox Game Studios

As is common with internet rumors, you should always take them with a very big grain of salt. In this case, Xbox gamers were excited to hear of the possibility of a legendary gaming franchise coming back into the hands of the developers that helped create it. Of course we’re talking about the Banjo-Kazooie franchise and the potential for Playtonic Games to return to their roots and work on a new new entry. People were quick to both support and deny the news, saying that people should wait until the news was confirmed. Many fans of the awesome franchise were hopeful that such an announcement would happen at this years OX19 conference for Microsoft.

This particular rumor popped up on ResetEra, and according to the developer of the Yooka-Laylee franchise, the so-called leak is indeed false. The studio issued a full statement, denying the rumors and making it very clear that there were no plans to work on a remake or anything like that. “While we would love to work with the bear and the bird again, that ball isn’t in our court,” Playtonic says, wishing that they could return to the platforming franchise that helped build them up all those years ago when most of their staff still worked at Rare. But sadly for fans, no one at Playtonic can really make that call as Rare still holds the rights to the property. It was this that led to Playtonic attempting to recapture that feeling of nostalgia with Yooka-Laylee, a 3D platformer that made many homages to the older franchise.

“We are keen to continue progressing as a studio, carrying the experience of games we worked on, old and new, to create new characters and adventures for you to (hopefully) love,” the statement said.

The statement from the company acknowledges how people could have misconstrued clues saying, “We’re sorry if this isn’t what you wanted to hear from us, at first, we found it amusing that Ed Bryan’s bag is being used as serious ‘evidence’, but we reckon it wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t set the record straight.” Of course this whole thing is just the internet rumor machine running wild on a lean fuel mixture of hopeful hype, but it was sadly not to be.