Dear 343 industries,
I’ve played halo games since the early 2000’s. I grew up watching Bungie grow as an emerging tech company and this was really my first exposure to what is now a lifelong career in tech, having served in roles as a management consultant, investor, and mentor to tech companies. I am incredibly passionate, engaged, and invested in the Halo series. After 15+ years of playing games across Bungie’s and 343’s products, I was severely let down by the gradually degrading story-line, production quality, and focus of the franchise with each successive post-Reach game; however, I always thought Infinite had so much potential and it was worth waiting for the major features like Forge to release. Now, finally, 1 year after a delayed and bugged title launch, the chickens have come home to roost. I’ve crashed on Forge for over 100 hours, watched all of the 343 tutorials, read articles on the functions, watched more videos, and meticulously learned and crafted my way to proficiency. I hope the feedback below is received with sobriety, as I have taken the game, franchise, and this tool, quite seriously, and loaned it perhaps more love than most gamers would.
So, let’s be SMART here (thanks for the framework), and provide some feedback. It will be harsh at first; I encourage the mods to read through to the end before deleting this. As harsh as it is, it is the truth, and what 343 needs to hear, short of a mirror. But it does get more actionable toward the end.
Specifics: this is going to be painful at first. Brace for some harsh truth. But know, it is the truth.
Item 1: The Launch
The Forge leaks months before launch built a ton of momentum and buzz, and this was encouraging. I genuinely thought this could move the game in the right direction and draw crowds back. Then the roadmap was released. Forge got delayed another 2 months which was not ideal but tolerable; the real mistake 343 made here is the messaging. Saying your bolt-on feature to your delayed game that was already delayed is being delayed again and is going to release as a Beta, is well… very… ‘beta’, though in a different sense. To be very frank, when I was 19 years old and saw that Bungie was splitting from Microsoft and this new company called 343 was going to be the Halo contingent, my gut told me that 343 was going to be the ‘Space Cadets’; i.e. the zealous, half-baked coders who were extremely passionate about the franchise but definitively not the A-team. Well, launching Halo Infinite late, Forge late, then late again, and then finally calling it a ‘Beta’ is such a sadly non-gravitas way to launch a game feature that is intended to save the game (and brand - yes, the entire brand is in jeopardy, and this was a key moment to bring it back), to be frank. It really makes me wonder what 343 thought was going to happen, as this is the marketing equivalent of whispering as quietly as possible in to the room at your launch party, “hey, our big saving-grace product is launching - oh and by the way, it’s a partial product”.
An alternative reality that an A-team brand like Infinity Ward or Rockstar would have likely pursued: the studio took the time it needed to produce a minimally-buggy version, announced a re-launch of Halo Infinite when it’s truly the form it was intended to be, and absolutely crushed marketing and brand building while polishing Forge into a gem in the meantime. Forge dropped along with Halo Infinite 2.0 and won millions of users all over again, this time here to stay. Maybe that’s rosey-eyed but even a lower-fi version of that is better than, again, delaying your delayed product and calling it a Beta; player’s didn’t even know if maps could be saved in the Beta at one point following this announcement. This is brand building 101 be it at a startup, F500, or influencer level, and it makes me truly wonder if there’s a marketing team at 343. Disagree the readers may, but it is objective truth that generally more forethought should have gone into engineering Forge’s premier to be the game-saving catalyst that 343 and the community hoped it would be. Instead it was assumed that the confetti would pop and I’m not so sure we’re seeing much more than cone hats. This branding-wise was true, inexcusable, complete flop IMO and more reflective of Halo Infinite’s troubled road rather than a new path forward.
Topic 2: The Rollout
This brings me to the actual implementation of Forge, the next logical reflection point. We are now 2 weeks into Forge and boy have I played it through. The complexity of the tool and the steep user-barriers is understandable given that 343 is rumored to have been tasked by MSFT leadership with creating (from what I have heard) the predecessor/foundation for Microsoft’s grander vision of building a modern cousin to Gary’s Mod. But that’s no excuse for releasing 2 hours of cursory videos that barely even scratch the surface of how to use the tool. I watched them multiple times over, and found that when I entered Forge, there were logic paths that I would never have even known, were it for some poor committed souls who posted tutorials after toiling for weeks pre-launch figuring out this dev tool. 343’s user content is overall woefully insufficient on its own to bring the community up to basic proficiency. Instead, i suppose they expected the community to pick up the bill, which in this one instance, fortunately, it did. Kind of. I still have so many questions, but sure.
Where 343 also seems to have shirked the check was with community integration. Let me restate that - 343 had absolutely no plan post-launch of Forge. That is scary, and borders on criminal negligence of Microsoft’s Good Will, which is the line item in its 10-K for the valuation of the brand itself. Halo custom games have existed for nearly 2 decades (more?), and with the launch of the single greatest custom game engine in the franchise’s history, the actual plan for streamlining players to content was, seriously, truly, stunningly, bafflingly, and entirely, absent. There is no custom game matchmaking service, no easy way to find content without involving a multi-step process of online forum searches and shoot-from-the-hip keyword searching in-game. There’s Waypoint, ForgeHub, Forgera, Reddit, Discord Servers, all of which seem to be competing for air and lack any and all coordination. and believe me - I’ve tried. I’ve tried for hours, and it’s confusing, half-cocked, disorganized, and unclear. And I’m a hard-core Halo player that only plays this game, every day, for 5+ hours per day. If anyone at 343 thought that the average gamer was going to run back to HI upon Forge’s release, go on Waypoint forums, Reddit, Discord, etc., know where to go to find map threads, then find the ones they want and search them in game to play test them, then pick their favs and launch it with their buddies, I’m sorry, this seems so out of touch with, again, brand building 101, and I’m at a loss for why no thought was provided to harness the community → Forge → a general audience. To be blunt, the lack of diligence and coordination of the Forge + Custom Games 2.0 rollout is so inept and aloof that it is shocking a professional gaming studio charged with one of the singular greatest gaming franchises in history would not think this through. This particular issue is such a failure, and you deserve an absolute bath in front of MSFT mgmt.
Also - the ‘top played’ menu is a detractor rather than a bonus; it is a nightmare of unfinished work products and broken game modes, which will probably push tons of new Halo players AWAY since that is the only mainstream / obvious route to get content.
Topic 3: Functionality
Last and most important is the actual mechanics of Forge and Custom Games. So it’s a Beta - again, referencing above, it should never have been positioned as one - but I understand it won’t be perfect. What I’m seeing is so, so far from perfect it begs the question of can it even be fixed given the rumored staggering technical debt shackling the Slipspace Engine to a state comatose. Chief among concerns here is the massively over-engineered system; 100+ hours into this, I still find the lines blurry and perhaps impossible to settle the mutual exclusivity of game-mode, scripting, and physical map. Nearly every map that comes out of Forge needs a custom game mode tuned like an F1 car for either of them to function. Not only this, but the system to save, and edit current game modes being released by the community is not broken - it is entirely dysfunctional. Game modes and maps are being promoted to the top of the popular list without being published, leaving players wondering why they can’t save and edit them. Those that are published can be saved, but when trying to edit them and develop and alternative, the saves do not register. Last, lobbies won’t load with the game modes and the game countdown will hit zero and resent the ‘Play’ button.
I still remember back in the Halo 3 days when plug-and-play was generally easy and possible as long as the maps were set up decently well. Boy how I miss those days. I’m certainly a fan of more profound linkages between map and mode, but Forge outputs in their current state collapse under anything but 100.00000000000% perfect synchronization that is all built by the editor from scratch, with a singular intended game mode. Think I’m incompetent? I’ve had work featured on ForgeHub when Geomerging was still a necessity and 2000’s still had 1 digit at the end. Since then, I’d like to think I’ve picked up a thing or two, and if you don’t know what Geomerging is, you can reseat yourself entirely, please.
Then, there are the saving bugs, which absolutely should not be an issue, Beta or no Beta. Spending hours on something to have the game crash, or exit and find that your map has corrupted (in the various ways the game communicates this, which is also not clear) multiple versions back, should never, ever be a ‘quality of life improvement’; it’s a necessity for life.
Last, I’m going to gloss over the hoards of bugs that range from superficially sloppy to extremely frustrating, like sporadic texture changes, weapons consistently falling to pieces when moving them only to reassemble once placed, PreFabs failing to maintain composure when being moved, undo functions doing anything but undoing your last action, still getting back-end interface text showing up on the front-end user interface like “Unstable Jitter”, the list goes on, and on. And on, and onandonandon. And. On. AND. ON.
Yes 343, it’s a Beta… we heard. This does not absolve you from producing a functional product. You didn’t produce a functional product. Let me repeat that; a Beta does not absolve you from producing a functional product. What you just released is not a functional product and it is certainly not going to save your business in its current state.
Now, let’s proceed to our next SMART, Measurable. I hope to be a bit more constructive in this next section.
Measurable:
I’ll keep the next few sections more concise.
I won’t pretend that I’m sitting in front of 343’s business analytics dashboard - that is, I assume they have one, which given 343’s past performance, I would call a leap of faith assumption at this point. Instead of projecting my viewpoints on how 343 isn’t meeting the bar business-wise, I’ll pose some introspective questions to the 343 team as a counselor subliminally pushes a Napoleonic patient toward self discovery. Let’s start by dangling that 20 million at-launch user number out here as a baseline, since 343 loves to tout that victory from antiquity as if it justifies the current state of the game. To pop the bubble, it doesn’t justify anything, it was a short-lived vanity metric, and it doesn’t change the state of the game right now. Not let’s proceed to think about this in-depth.
So maybe you saw a 1000% increase in monthly users - great job! A few minor considerations:
Do you think the user base now makes up a sizeable enough monthly audience to sustain the business through microtransactions? If not, do you think Forge will continue to pull new players to HI?
If you cross-referenced your average monthly user purchases, average purchase amount, and did the arithmetic, how does your business look this next year? That is likely your SOM.
How does your LTV and CAC look? How’re they changing this month if compared to the pre-Forge trailing twelve month average?
How’s the community reacting to Forge? A few hundred LFG posts per night for custom game lobbies? Or a few thousand? Are those material impacts to the business?
Is this driving a sizeable enough audience to continue to staff a team on Forge to effectively and efficiently implement your proclaimed ‘quality of life improvements’? It would be perhaps disheartening if it took another 6 months to roll out the next batch of bug fixes.
In sum, for measurable, my gut says the data that the 343 team is looking at is superficially stupendous, with 1000%+ increases across the board - here’s my final question - does that close your business case and in result enable your team to continue working to build MATERIAL momentum on Halo Infinite, or is this a vanity metric parade at its finest?
If it doesn’t, you probably need to seriously consider how you’re delivering the product to the marketplace, the ease of use of the product, and the virality of the product beyond the already-capture Halo Infinite community. Ultimately, it requires major investment to take customers away from competitors; 343 is going to need an A-player budget, A-player talent, and A-player strategy compartmentalized from organizational politics if it is going to build back to an A-player game. Because it isn’t an A-player game. It’s a C, D, maybe even E-player game right now. A-player is the 10-year platform bar. That’s GTA. Halo right now is the butt of all gaming community jokes. Even CyberPunk made it out of the hole HI is still in.
Actionable - by being Realistic:
Now, I’ve been harsh, but I still love Halo, and want to see it and its developers thrive again. So, as rough as I am in tone, it’s to hopefully give a wakeup call that Forge dropping in its current state truly isn’t going to be a sonic boom for the brand. A few suggestions, take them or leave them. Considering the resources are limited at 343 and arent likely growing any time soon with the Valley shedding software jobs like it’s open season right now, I’ve tried to organize it by priority.
-Get a plan together for streamlining custom games ASAP, and divert as much attention to this effort as possible. You need an engine to drive users back to the platform and currently, it is pretty clear there was not and still is no plan to actually gravitate a general audience beyond hardcore Halo followers. The business should have placed equal or greater attention on accessibility through new rollout systems for Forge and Custom Games, as it did getting Forge to market. It’s cringe to see that the engineering team spent so much time building this tool only for it to be whispered into the digiverse without a tactical distribution plan beyond half a dozen cursory & half-baked tutorials presented by engineers who probably aren’t being paid for their communication skills (though I so appreciated you all doing this, it was a solid step in the right direction for the brand!!). To save Halo Infinite, Forge desperately needed a multi-dimensional approach and this ain’t it folks. 343i Corporate Strategy department - this is your que. If there is one.
-In tandem to above, have the engineering team prioritize the bugs that prevent usability, rather than bugs that simply hinder it. The emphasis here should lean toward front-end usership, i.e. custom games, but some critical Forge fixes will go a long way for content production speed. I’m talking about the items I referenced above regarding 1) save corruption, 2) crashing, 3) custom game mode plug-and-playability; 4) custom game mode changeability. Realizing these are probably the most difficult to fix, even having a system that tells me which map versions are corrupted, or that a custom game won’t or probably will doodie the bed for the map I’m loading before I spend 5 minutes loading my party into it, is far better than voodoo guessing what various error prompts mean (e.g. repeating loop of could not connect to dedicated server, the list goes on), or loading a custom game and finding it’s total chaos.
-Once these severe issues are resolved, you’ve likely still missed the mark to bring millions of players back. Fixing the quality of life issues won’t do this either, to be bluntly honest, because people respond to fireworks, not incremental long-term enhancements. Maybe I’m wrong but I’m gonna go out on a whim and say Forge hasn’t been a supernova for usership, albeit maybe a pop. I would recommend focusing on how you integrate all of the best forge community creations into matchmaking; and further, how these creations are marketed beyond the HI platform to reach users not already deeply immersed in the Halo community. This will require human capital and efforts that expand well beyond the scope of your engineering teams. If you can’t hire the talent, consider tapping into the MSFT mothership. I am sure it has resources that can be dedicated, somewhere in the enterprise.
Timely
I’m giving you a 3 page situational analysis 2 weeks into launch after investing 100+ hours in forge. There you go, it’s timely, and I gave it a more earnest shot than most. I hope you take this seriously - it is a very serious situation you’re in.
Right now, to be brutally honest, Forge is just another fragment of a 8-10 year old Beta that functions more like a sloppy, hacked together pre-Alpha. Yes, the deep-halo community is wringing fun out of it through endless trial and error of map loading, map making, map testing, but if 343 is gonna make its next $ billion and have this be a 10 year platform, there needs to be so much more thought into not only building the platform back and raising awareness, but also how Forge catalyzes the general gamer to load the game up again. Which involved so much more than pushing a product launch button. Right now, there are more similarities between Halo Infinite Forge and FyreFestival than there are with CyberPunk’s comeback. I would highly suggest the team give serious thought to what’s wrong beyond just what 343 is seeing from the hardcore Halo community. It’s more about what’s not visible or audible; that’s the general audience you want so badly to save your P&L.
On a final note, maybe what needs to happen is for a billionaire to buy 343, make some management changes, and tell the programming base that it’s time to buckle up, slap “yes” in that email chain, and behave like the varsity-level big-name brand from which it emerged years ago. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking that such an approach could be applied in the right context, which is very much 343’s context.
I probably won’t use forge again after I publish my upcoming map, and I’m not hopeful for change, because we probably would have seen it already if 343 was up to the task. But at least I tried here to raise some awareness about the truth behind this mess called Forge’s launch. I hope to see Halo shine again someday, as well as 343i, truly. Thank you for considering my input. It will probably be deleted by a mod, which would frankly only reinforce the potentially irreconcilable problems hurting 343.
