Longtime listener, first time caller. How does Halo Studios fit into what's happened today? I assume their next project (rumored H1 remake?) is do or die for them at this point after the long list of failure? I'll hang up and listen.
For any dev in a western studio who is under MS, any project is do or die for them. Any. If you think you're working on a sacred cow, you're wrong.
As for Halo Studios, i'm honestly not entirely convinced that game ever ships. Thats not me speaking on the quality of the project, mind you, just more speaking to the publishing reality MS is faced with; they own Call of Duty, the FPS IP that basically took over Halo's entire presence in the FPS market genre as the years ticked by. As far as market impact, Halo has not had a large market hit in a long time, and the studio has faced nothing but turmoil since 4 shipped. I feel like you can pick basically any year since 2018 and say that was the worst year for Halo as an IP and you'd be on the money for the most part. Despite folks always thinking budgets somehow don't exist for Xbox, they always have, and when you have Call of Duty, which is more a production pipeline than it is a game, a pipeline which requires ever-increasing investment in order to be maintained, while Halo hasn't come close to sniffing that level of RoI, you eventually are gonna have to make a decision on which one has a future and which one doesn't.
Even if this new Halo project ships - it would need to recapture a market in a way that I just haven't seen occur since maybe Doom 2016, with the added bonus that Halo's success is really not measured by the quality of its SP campaigns, and more about its presence as an online MP shooter, so it can't even stand out in the way that Doom 2016 did (focusing on a solid campaign), cause even if its the best Halo campaign thats ever been produced, if the online MP doesn't catch on, then thats basically a wrap.
MS throughout the years but particularly since Bungie walked, has always been open to the idea of just licensing out Halo as an IP for others to develop should they have a strong enough pitch for it. We almost got a major Halo release that wasn't helmed by then-343i not even a couple of years ago. Mind you, Halo Studios got impacted today despite both wanting to ship a title next year, a title that is being made on an engine they've never shipped on (Unreal), and now with the added bonus of having to ship on more platforms than you ever have before. From the outside looking in, Halo Studios is being setup to fail. You wouldn't ever cut resources at a marquee team that is, on paper, within 16 months of shipping. Thats just a recipe for disaster.
