Yet again, a new report suggests that rather than current franchise stewards 343 Industries themselves, the development of all future Halo entries will now be handled by outside studios.
Word of this shift in 343 Industries’ production plans was first raised to the public on July 14th courtesy of Bathrobe Spartan, a noted Halo scooper and podcaster whose track record includes the accurate leaking of Halo Infinite‘s battle royale and Firefight modes.
Providing an update on “the State of 343 Industries”, Bathrobe Spartan explained that following the recent rash of layoffs across both Xbox and 343 Industries proper, some of the studios’ roles had been “transferred to MS/Xbox Team instead of being internalized” in order to allow for “a clearer separation of responsibilities for Halo content”.
“According to the people we talked to (12 since March 2024), the studio appears to [have a current employee headcount] of less than 280 as of May 2024,” he added. “Only 30 of the remaining staff is related to Game-Content-Production. Many are Business oriented roles & Producers.”
In light of Halo Infinite‘s failing due to their mismanagement and its currently being helmed by a skeleton crew, Bathrobe Spartan then revealed that “343 Industries has shifted to a new production method” for the flailing FPS franchise.
“[The studio is] separating ‘leading development’ & production, hiring lead positions to do the concept & pre-production in-house & handing off the production work to [other] studios,” alleged the scooper. “Similar to Halo Wars 2 [which was developed by 343 Industries in-partnership with Total War franchise developer Creative Assembly]”.
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As to how this new production method would exactly play out, Barthrobe Spartan explained that 343 Industries was “recruiting less Content-creating roles and more Lead profiles to test, iterate and validate content & gameplay before working with external studios to go full-production.”
To this end, he then took a brief detour to detail how “two Partnered studios (US & EU)” had already been “contracted to work on 2 separated projects this way”.
“Both projects are still in Pre-Production phase & none have entered Production Phase so far,” said the scooper. “One appears to be a PvP bigger scale oriented project, legacy of what was started for Infinite years ago. Estimate from the people we talked to: at least 2 years before any release.”
Returning to his original topic, Bathrobe Spartan informed Halo fans, “This new method is an important shift to how the company worked so far on projects. Aim is for this new method to help produce content for games at a more reliable pace in the future & cost effective, but it takes a lot of time to ramp up from years of working differently.”
“This new method of production is also in hope of not reproducing what happened to Halo Infinite,” he clarified as he brought his main thoughts to a close. “This is (potentially) a more reliable way to control budget and product quality while avoiding delays and internal production issues by separating roles.”
At current, both 343 Industries or their parent company Microsoft have yet to offer any official comment on Bathrobe Spartan’s report.
As noted above, this is not the first time that the specific prospect of 343 Industries outsourcing Halo‘s development future has been raised to the general public.
In January 2023, Bathrobe Spartan himself similarly reported that, in the wake of the studio’s aforementioned layoffs, “343 Industries is not going to disappear, however, the game development part of the studio will disappear. The projects and the future of the studio are going to lie in a two-point strategy: Coordinate the monitoring of Halo Infinite and franchise the Halo license to other studios.”
However, this initial report would be directly denied by 343 Industries.
Taking to the official Halo Twitter account, Studio Head Pierre Hintze declared, “Halo and Master Chief are here to stay. 343 Industries will continue to develop Halo now and in the future, including epic stories, multiplayer, and more of what makes Halo great.”
