| VersusEvil said: I’d be surprised if the next Halo is even done by 343 at this point. |
What I think will happen/is happening is either one of two things.
- Campaign team has been entirely laid off because the expansion plans are scrapped, the next Halo story will be a full fledged entry but it will be in very early pre-production so there's a lot of Campaign team with nothing to do until it hits production, so they are unfortunately an easy target for layoffs, in the meantime, 343i will focus on doubling down on Multiplayer (Pierre strengths since he saved TMCC).
- Or 343i will scale down and focus on the Infinite Multiplayer but they may hand the Halo IP out to external studios and double down on publishing operations in the meantime, in effect act a bit like World's Edge for now while they restructure themselves, even though I think it should have been the other way around, 343 should had handed Multiplayer to Certain Affinity and 343i should have focused on Campaign.
I think what has happened is a bit of a combination of 343's underperformance making them an easy target but also a studio wide restructuring. Still looks like a lot of the layoffs were focused on 343i, I don't really see much anywhere else, a few Community Managers which comes across as looking like streamlining operations in the most shitty way and a couple of Producers here and there. Feels like 343i took the brunt of it.
konnichiwa said:
Well 12 monhts of Halo Inf; negative news and people should not be surprised what's happening now... |
Last 6 months of Infinite news has been fairly positive.
But it looks like the damage at the start was too much and made them an easy target, plus restructuring their plans.
But it's important to add context to what is happening, the entire tech industry is undergoing massive, brutal layoffs right now, 1,026 tech companies laid off 154,386 employees between them in 2022 and 122 tech companies laid off 37,526 employees between them so far in 2023.
Microsoft hired 40,000 employees between 2021 - 2022 alone.
These tech layoffs were coming no matter what and someone would take the harshest blow, it's less about performance or Microsoft making profits, it's not about Activision-Blizzard as some are trying to make it out to be, the entire tech industry over-hired across the pandemic and as a result now, they're punishing their employees because shareholders are greedy assholes.
Things are going to get a lot worse with the fear of recession, Microsoft will likely have more layoffs, a huge chunk of the gaming industry will too.
