Rare Games, the Midland developer owned by Microsoft, has confirmed it will be opening a new facility in Birmingham’s Fazeley Studios.

The move - first revealed by the Birmingham Post in November - will create 90 jobs at the space in the Digbeth studios. Rare has signed a five-year lease on the office.

Rare studio head Mark Betteridge said: “We need to be much more flexible in how we staff a team and utilise space. Setting up the new facility at Fazeley Studios will help us do this.

“We selected this location after a UK wide search because Fazeley Studios is centrally located in Birmingham’s new digital district Digbeth, and it is a hub purely for creatives. We will be surrounded by businesses that will make an appealing working environment and a pool of local talent which we can tap into when we need to contract staff.”

The opening of the Rare office will mean Fazeley Studios is now completely let, after less than a year in business. Other tenants include Substrakt, Maverick Television, Big Button, First Light Movies and Birmingham Jazz.

Lucan Gray, the creator and owner of Fazeley Studios, said: “To have a Microsoft Games Studio come to Fazeley Studios shows that world class digital and creative companies now see Digbeth for what it is - a nationally competitive area which is attracting leading creative and digital players.

“Fazeley Studios is now full of digital companies that are growing rapidly. Since the onset of the credit crunch we have let space in Digbeth to 59 creative companies employing 680 people.

“This is in stark contrast to a lot of traditional business sectors and shows the importance of the creative sector in regenerating the economy.

We are now working on the next phase of development for Digbeth to cater for the very strong demand we have tapped into.”

Rare was founded in Ashby-de-la-Zouch in 1982, and currenly has its headquarters in Twycross, Leicestershire. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2002.

It has been linked with Microsoft’s ‘Project Natal’ - a motion-sensitive control system for the Xbox 360 games console that would see players controlling games by moving their bodies. Rare is believed to be working on a number of schemes for the project, and there have been reports there will be Natal work done at Fazeley.

> November 2009:  The rise and rise of Fazeley Studios