Everyone is assuming we will get 3 month seasons eventually, but I had a scary thought. What if Infinite isn’t bringing in anywhere near the money they anticipated, and so they’ve reduced the budget for future content? What if the money people have decided that the project is a flop, and they just want to get the best return on what they’ve already spent but not risk a lot more money? The result would be that content currently in the pipeline would be slowly trickled out to keep the game propped up longer, while future undeveloped content would have been reduced or eliminated. Seems to me that’s what we are seeing. We are now at 10 month seasons. Current content was clearly meant to have been released months ago (bunny faces in The Yappening points to Springtime)’. Obviously they’d never tell us that the 10 year plan is now 3 years of support, but if you look at what they are doing and not what they are saying, then it’s a real possibility that the long term fate of Infinite has already been decided. Remember the long promised deep look at a roadmap that never really came? Maybe it’s because the road ends at a cliff.
theyve already made billions from the campaign promo codes merch store content. you have to be stupid and crazy to think otherwise. they arent hurting for money they are rolling in money for life
Yet they always talk about moving resources around. They’re owned by Microsoft and they are on the back of the box of every Xbox Series X console. You’d think they’d have all the resources at their disposal.
I’m probably going to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it almost feels like either upper management or Xbox are trying to get rid of Halo at this point. They wanted the game out in 2020 and the game was in a worse state than now. They are enforcing the live service model onto most of their games, they clearly aren’t giving 343 enough help to get Infinite to a good state quickly enough, and so far we have heard nothing from Xbox nor 343 themselves over what’s going on with Halo being like this. It feels like Xbox gave them a certain budget for initial development, that dried up, they gave them the (much smaller) live-service budget when the game launched unfinished, and left 343 to do their thing, and said “Here’s your last chance, it’s sink or swim.”
They are given a live-service budget when they are still developing the game.
I don’t necessarily believe that Xbox is trying to sabotage Halo and 343, nor do I want to spread false information like this is true. However this fictional perspective would explain why the game remains in an unfinished state.
I see nothing scary about any of that.
If budgets are cut because investors don’t see the point in continuing to support it, maybe some changes are done the to management and a new, hopefully, better management team is brought in which’d make the hard decision to axe H:I and start anew.
“sink or swim” on a game that made billions in under a year ok
Definitely a possibility.
Infinite is going to get absolutely obliterated once MW2 comes out and when destiny 2 lightfall comes out at the end of February that will mean even less people will be interested in season 3
Infinite made billions? I highly doubt it. Fortnite makes billions. Infinite is not even close to being a popular game. Microsoft can brag about players, but the majority of those players dropped the game quickly and probably spent $0. I’d bet most campaign players accessed the game through game pass, so i find it hard to believe that Infinite has directly generated billions. Millions maybe, but not billions. And even if it did, the player base has fallen dramatically. It’s very likely Microsoft has chosen to take the money and run. I don’t expect more than 3 years of slow drip support.
lets see a million promos and selling out quickly on varying products of all kinds all promoting infinite halo merch and halo infinite related merch. selling 1-2million? if not more copies of halo infinite then I know plenty of people spent up to 100+ on the store buying points for cosmetics. Those people holding out on spending? yeah I bet a large portion bought points by now
A Live Service game is meant to be a consistent influx of money. They got the initial launch money, but 343 is expected to keep that revenue stream flowing.
343 has failed to do so.
So yeah. Sink or swim. Xbox took the initial profit and said “make us more or you’re done.”
but this isnt a live service and makes far more money then mcc which has seasons with content and what not
releasing updates and still working on finishing the game an alpha phase game is just that completing a game that is in alpha and incomplete. that doesnt make it live service whether they want to call it that or not. even though they dont want to call it alpha
No that still is live service. We all hate that Infinite is like this, but it is still live service. Even if you feel like changing the definition the point still stands. Even if it is terrible. That’s like a 1 star restaurant is still a restaurant. They can still serve absolutely disgusting slop, but they still serve it for money. So it is a restaurant.
And yes infinite makes more money than MCC. That is a given (at least until the inevitable MTX are added.) But everyone knows, even Xbox, that Halo Infinite is not making as much money as it should. Not enough people are still playing it, and that means not enough people are buying from their store. If your paycheck is less than what it was when you started, but you’ve done the same amount of work, you’ll wonder where that money went. From there you either fix the problem, or work somewhere else.
Infinite is the same. They aren’t making as much money as they should. We know the money is with the players. If the players aren’t coming back, then you need to make that up somewhere else.
this is just speculation and this is how baseless rumors start. i wouldn’t be surprised (and actually i wouldn’t care anyway)…
the best thing we could take away from all this, is to not believe any AAA game developer (and actually even indies) anything, especially these ridiculus 10 year lifespan lies (still can’t believe people fell for that in infinite and used it to defend this game)
but gamers don’t seem to learn anything from being treated like a cow to be milked. maybe this is a dysfunctional releationship between gamers and devs/publishers.
I give it 2 years of slow drip, then things ramping up once they find their footing, like every other main stay game of the last 10 years.
I hate that fact but right now playing a game in the first 2 years of its life is like playing a broken mess.
Agreed. Releasing unfinished games is the norm now. Incredibly unfortunate for the entirety of the gaming community.
Actually it is a mixed bag, if halo infinite was released finished next year, we would still have challanges that are near impossible, wouldn’t have per match XP which is getting tested in the mini season, and a lot of gameplay QoL that has been added wouldn’t be there.
Yeah t here is a lot of disapointment, I am looking at the false advertising that is would have split screen, but we are getting a better game out of it.
Not trying to shill for 343i here just looking at the positives and the negatives.
Its not an if, they clearly are not making enough money to realistically support the game. It literally just dropped to #18 on XBL, zero chance they are making enough money to support dozens of developers actively working on the game. Now they could theoretically just have a really small skeleton crew working on the game for a very long time, but from a Live Service model perspective its clearly a flop so far.
its unlikely to last the 3 years in my opinion, I’d say it’ll last 2 years. There is hope, but we’re relying on a BR mode or something basically moonshotting the game into top 5 territory for a while, which I think is optimistic…
You forget how popular it was the first few months of release, it isn’t crazy to think it had absurd amounts of MTX sales those first few months. Also consider Campaign sales and/or Gamepass subscriptions and it is not too crazy to think the game made huge chunks of money in a relatively short period of time. It clearly isn’t now, but back through November-December its not impossible.
So far Halo Infinite has seen a little over 20 million players. Just under 1 million copies of campaign were sold. So there’s revenue in the neighborhood of $50 Million right there. The rest of the revenue is coming from cosmetics which was doing very well the 1st quarter and then fell off a cliff.
I don’t have access to all the financial data here. But it’s clear that they haven’t made any profit off this game yet. They’re close to covering the development budget. They’ll turn a huge & sustainable profit when the game is finished and a large % of the players come back and start spending money on the battle pass and store.
Pro Tip: 343 analysts know what you’re buying in the shop. They need this data to learn what items are doing well that people like. This data is shared with the artists so they can make new cosmetics that they think you’re going to enjoy using.
Popularity isn’t so much the issue, as it is the whales buying everything. 343 and by extension Microsoft, do not care at all if players who either buy nothing from the store or individuals who buy a one item from the store every now and then abandon the game.
The primary people they want to keep playing the game are the people who buy everything from the store, and I don’t doubt there’s more than just a handful playing who consistently do that week over week. For every jaded person, there’s at least two people who just buy it all because they can afford it or because they want to buy some items. So long as the whales stay, their blubber will keep the studio warm.
At least, until the casual playerbase gets burnt out by lack of content, the whales start getting pitted against the die hards, the whales leave because the diehards are too good, and the diehards leave because the easy pickings have left. Which is what usually happens in these scenarios.
And as @FathomKnight said, if we consider all of the money that Microsoft makes from everything Infinite related, they have for sure made at least double what the cost of development has been. I hate the store the much as the next person, but to act like this game hasn’t turned a profit is absurd.