Well 12 monhts of Halo Inf; negative news and people should not be surprised what's happening now...

The incompetence of managing the Halo IP is truly staggering.
They should be pumping out Halo games left and right, like they were doing during 360 times. Instead, we only get the mainline series with a new game every half a decade or so.

Btw. I finally started the Infinite campaign when the mission replay update dropped in November(?) and while I haven't completed the campaign yet (approx. about 2/3 or 3/4 completed) I must say it's definitely the least memorable Halo game thus far. The open world design is good but it still feels pretty small and there are no interesting changes in environment or scripted events to speak off. Even my least favourite Halo games (2 and 4) have a few memorable missions but so far the best mission in Infinte is probably the very first.

What I think will happen/is happening is either one of two things.

1. 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).
   
   
2. 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.

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.

Even Riot Games is having layoffs.

Sounds like the entire Campaign team is gone.

Procedural Technical Artist

Technical Environment Artist

Morale at 343 is going to be in the gutter, I wonder how hard news like this makes it to hire talent, especially with the looming threat of being laid off until March.

Another former 343 developer criticising Microsoft's shitty contractor policies...343 is definitely not getting a 2nd studio anymore, they might be forced to switch to Unreal Engine at this rate since Microsoft is never going to do anything about their contractor policy issue.

343 really got screwed by it, T10/Playground have each other, 343 had nobody but themselves, on a far more technically demanding IP...Creation will probably be safe from the contractor policy since Bethesda has 3 studios and employees cycling through multiple IPs, I'd expect Arkane/Tango to go fully Unreal Engine in the future though and luckily I think I heard ID Tech is relatively easy to use and a lot are already familiar with it since a lot of engines were built from it.

But I do think Indiana Jones will be Unreal Engine.

343 really got the short end of the stick on this contractor/engine shit. How do you even fix the issue? Can't open a 2nd studio, can't hire more people, the contractor policy isn't changing, it starts to feel like Unreal Engine is inevitable. Unfortunate.

Maybe write to the EC commitee that one of the remedies should be 'treating contractors better'.


Oh yeah from Klobrille:

As Phil rightfully said, gaming should be about joy. I hope Microsoft can find a way to make that count for creators in the long term as well.

It only applies to America IIRC.

They do it because if I remember correctly, Microsoft abused contractors back in the 90s, they hired temp workers and kept them on for years whilst not providing them with fulltime employee benefits, so temp workers sued Microsoft (in America) and won, now Microsoft can't hire temp workers longer than a certain period (18 months) because if they do, they have to treat them like fulltime employees and give them full benefits so Microsoft instead hires them for just under that period and then gives them the boot, but there is also a stipulation that if they do that they can't re-hire that same temp worker for a certain period either (6 months).

Course that is probably okay for most Microsoft products (the timeline) but it does not work with videogames, these take 3 years minimum of production, 36 months, in the middle of those 36 months you have to drop a whole bunch of contractors and can't rehire them for 6 months so you lose valuable experience and knowledge, especially important when the knowledge is on a tool which is only unique to that specific studio, it's a bit of a cluster fuck but Microsoft doesn't seem to have any interest in changing things.

I don't even know the contractor policies in Europe.

I will say though that some Halo fans, not anyone here, I'm talking about the Twitter/Reddit weirdos, the same ones who were calling for 343's heads for years, calling not just the leadership incompetent but the entire studio, demanding a complete studio overhaul or giving Halo to someone else, now saying that Halo is doomed after a massive shakeup which they demanded for years is a bit...

Anyway.

Yeah but they would then also own some EU studios with possibility of relocating some of the workers or even studios I assume EC would want some guarantees.