Microsoft let Spyro's developers go free to score an important publishing win instead

Toys for Bob was acquired in its entirety by Activision in 2005 and later brought under Microsoft’s umbrella through the Microsoft–Activision Blizzard deal. The studio was then relegated to supporting live-service titles like Overwatch 2 and Call of Duty. Eventually, Toys for Bob became independent by “buying back” its independence from Xbox and is now gleefully working on what the studio does best, i.e., platforming games. Still published by Xbox, Toys for Bob is now working on Spyro: A Realm Beyond.

Toys for Bob became independent from Activision Blizzard via a deliberate split in May 2024. The head of the studio, Paul Yan, sat down for an interview with GamesRadar+ and explained that once COVID hit, corporate priorities changed, and Toys for Bob had to support other titles.

Yan stated:

“During this timeline, COVID hit, and the world turned upside down. There were many, many changes that happened. One of the changes at the company was a corporate mandate to support large blockbuster IPs, such as Warzone, Modern Warfare, and Overwatch 2. So, Toys for Bob actually shifted into a support structure in order to support those teams, those initiatives, those games, those updates, those features, and we learned a ton. We spread out into territories that we weren’t familiar with. We learned a lot.”

However, Toys for Bob felt like it was losing its core identity. Yan and other studio members thought hard about the Microsoft–Activision Blizzard acquisition as they considered their future. They ultimately approached leadership at both Activision and Xbox with a “really bold plan.”

In a separate interview with GamesIndustry.biz, the studio said it wanted to “buy back our independence and take back creative control, organizational control, and financial control of our team, and spin off as a completely separate company so that we can focus on the types of games that are near and dear to our hearts, and also preserve the team and all the tenure that’s been built up over the years.” Basically, Toys for Bob said it “placed a big bet” on itself.

To the studio’s surprise, Microsoft and Activision supported its decision, but on one condition: the studio would have to make a game for Xbox to publish. The result was Spyro: A Realm Beyond, which is the first mainline entry in the Spyro franchise in over two decades.

Spyro: A Realm Beyond will arrive as a multiplatform release on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC, and will feature the first true dragon-flying mechanics for Spyro the Dragon.

Buy the Spyro Reignited Trilogy on Amazon