This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy” and has reviewed several Halo games, including the Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite.
I’ll give Asha Sharma this: she is not afraid to shake things up. Whether you love or hate how she’s run the Xbox business in her first six months as CEO so far, there are no sacred cows with her. Whether it’s slashing Xbox Game Pass prices, nuking an unpopular marketing campaign, restoring console exclusives, telling Obsidian to make a damn Fallout game already, or signing Hideo Kojima after PlayStation cancelled Physint, she is more than willing to flip over some tables to try and get Xbox to a better place. Unfortunately, these decisions have also come paired with a lot of layoffs. To say the situation for all at Xbox is changing would be to put it very lightly.
When it comes to the very fundamentals of Xbox’s game DNA, though, Sharma’s latest power move is arguably her most earthshaking one yet. The next mainline Halo will be developed by Activision. Meanwhile, Halo Studios – the series’ custodians since 2011 – has been hit with significant layoffs.
Read that again. Halo Studios, once known as 343 Industries – the developer founded purely to create Halo games – will no longer be the creative drivers behind Halo. The keys to the Warthog have been taken away and given to Activision, makers of Call of Duty and the crown jewel of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition. The company had to crawl through regulatory broken glass in order to get approval for such a move, so I suppose this is one way to help further justify that kind of expense.
This doesn’t reflect well on Xbox’s handling of Halo over the past 15 years. You know you f*cked up pretty bad when the developer that was renamed to Halo Studios less than a year ago is now no longer making the next big Halo game. Like, holy shit. Let that sink in for a minute. But from where I sit, Halo Studios’ issues have never been with raw talent. I absolutely loved Halo 4’s campaign that centered on Master Chief and Cortana’s relationship, but its multiplayer failed to live up to the Halo standard. The opposite happened with Halo 5, whose awful campaign sat alongside a phenomenally good multiplayer. And Halo Infinite finally put two great halves together…for a minute, until the modern needs of maintaining a living multiplayer shooter couldn’t be met by the studio.
Instead, the problem has always seemingly been with management. From a reported reliance on an ever-cycling crop of contractors, to having to onboard every one of those said contractors with Halo’s proprietary Blam/Slipspace engine, it made the studio wildly inefficient. I’ve also personally heard from a well-placed source in the past week that leadership is “ineffective” and “makes me facepalm on a regular basis.”
But one source does not a complete narrative make. Let’s instead look at the results. We are already less than three months away from Halo Infinite’s fifth anniversary. And, based on the “reboot” of 343 Industries under the new Halo Studios name, its change of leadership, and shift from the proprietary Slipspace engine to Unreal Engine 5, the chances that the existing development structure could ship a new big Halo game in the next five years seems slim at best.
Sharma, who has already made it clear she wants Xbox to take a franchise-first approach to what it invests its resources into, must’ve come to the same conclusion. Giving the series to Activision says one thing above all else to me: she wants a Halo game soon. And Activision, whether you love it or hate it, does have a pretty sterling track record of getting big-budget blockbuster games done in a timely fashion. They’re not always great games (see last year’s Black Ops 7), but they’re usually at least pretty good, and they always ship on time. Has a Call of Duty ever missed a holiday ship date? Not that I can recall – that’s the power of multiple support studios working together.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/handing-halo-to-activision-makes-business-sense-but-is-that-enough-to-save-the-series
