Bungie’s been delivering new Halo experiences at a pretty slow, but steady pace. In the 5 years that the Xbox 360 has been around, they’ve released two bona-fide Halo games; Halo 3 and Halo Reach (With ODST technically an expansion).
Now that they’re no longer the studio behind Halo, Microsoft and 343 industries – the company they created to step in to Bungie’s shoes – may be increasing Halo output. Apparently a new Halo game every 3 years just isn’t enough.
“There’s no explicit strategy that says we’re to ship a Halo game every year. I will say I think one Halo game every three years — which was kind of our old cadence – is probably not frequent enough,†Microsoft Game Studios Corporate VP Phil Spencer said in an interview with IGN. “We’re coming up on, what, next year is the 10th anniversary. You watch the change in gamers in 10 years. The percentage of players who are playing Reach that were I’ll say not old enough to play Halo 1 at the time, 10 years is a long time between launches,†he continued.
“We definitely think about a more persistent Halo engagement for customers and not going dark for two years, and Live helps obviously with multiplayer to keep people engaged.â€
I think one of the reasons that every Halo release is such a big event is that they’re spread relatively far apart, compared to other yearly franchises. Although Spencer admits to having a fair amount of approbation for Activision’s successful annualising of Call of Duty, it seems as though they’re not intent on milking the franchise completely dry.
"343 Industries is thinking a lot about how to take this franchise and turn it into something that people feel like they have an ongoing relationship with and they can entertain themselves more often. But it’s not, hey every November 6 or whatever we have to ship a game and build a production plan around that. We want to do things that make sense as a first party."
Halo: Reach is pretty damned fantastic, and we can only hope that 343 Industries continues to deliver that sort of quality. Do you think it would be possible if the series is annualised, and more importantly – would you buy each iteration?
Source : IGN
Last Updated: September 22, 2010
Nick de Bruyne
September 22, 2010 at 15:31
I wouldn’t mind a new Halo game every two years or so, as is the development timeframe for most games – 3 years is a little longer than most people want to wait, although they do support the multiplayer with decent multiplayer packs.
One year on the other hand is a different story, I think that franchises like Call of Duty are going to burn themselves out really fast if they keep this up. I feel a lot less interested in Black Ops compared to what I would have felt next year, but at the moment Activision is making tons of money from it but they are risking having the franchise lose its long time appeal.
Look at what happened to Guitar Hero