Spyro: A Realm Reborn studio Toys for Bob, which created the Skylanders series and later served as co-developer on Call of Duty under Xbox, went independent from Microsoft to focus on projects it's passionate about, says studio head Paul Yan.
Microsoft acquired longtime Toys for Bob parent company Activision Blizzard in a historic $69 billion deal in 2023, officially bringing the Skylanders developer under Xbox's umbrella. After years of supporting Call of Duty development under Activision, and later under Xbox, Toys for Bob struck a deal with Microsoft to go independent in 2024. Several weeks later, it said it reached an agreement with Xbox to publish its next game, and as recently as this month that game was revealed to be a new Spyro game.
With all of that context in mind, Toys for Bob's big plan seems to have finally come into view: go independent, get back to work on the games it's best known for, and still have the financial backing of Xbox. At least, that's how Yan makes it sound in an interview with GamesRadar+ for Summer Game Fest 2026.
"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 that there was a corporate mandate to support the large blockbuster IPs – Warzone, Modern Warfare, Overwatch 2, just to name a few," Yan explains.
"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, or at least hadn't spent a ton of time with. We learned a lot."
Ultimately, Yan says the team at Toys for Bob remains "very proud" of the work it did under Activision and Xbox, "but also, if we're honest with ourselves, we were just straying too far off from the types of games that we're passionate about – the types of games that we're known for. So we knew in the back of our mind, in that period, we wanted to get back to this somehow."
Yan adds that Toys for Bob was afforded plenty of time to "soul search" during Microsoft's long, complicated, legally messy acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023. At some point, the studio decided it wanted to get back to series like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot, which it had previously been given control of under Activision, and that's when it approached Microsoft with "a really bold plan."
"What we asked for, is that the Toys for Bob would buy back our independence and take back creative control of the kinds of projects that we can focus on, the financial control, the organizational control, and spin off as a separate company, in order to get back to the games we were known for, and also to preserve the tight-knit team, and all the long tenure that we've built up over the years," says Yan.
Now that that's all sorted out and everyone's happy, Toys for Bob is working on Spyro: A Realm Reborn with a spring 2027 release window on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Switch 2, and PC.
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