https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-08/how-microsoft-s-halo-infinite-went-from-disaster-to-triumph
Peak today is 3,900 on Steam. Overall down another -7% in the last seven days.
When business schools teach business 101 and talk about why it is so fundamentally important that companies never ever over-promise and under-deliver and the ramifications of that, they will refer to 343 Studios and Microsoft’s Halo Infinite.
I wish it wasn’t true as a huge Halo fan of 20 years, but outside of Palm Inc in 2011 with the Palm Pre and WebOS phones, I cannot remember a product that this business principal applies more to than Halo Infinite.
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Well I think it’s because people really wanted the game to succeed.
It had been a long time since a Halo game had been released. The art style stuff got people interested. CoD and Battlefield were looking tired and samey. I think people had frankly forgot what even happened in Halo 5 so it wasn’t automatically putting people off. Everybody wanted the game to succeed and tell a story in which 343 made a great game which shook things up.
Wanting something to be true is not the same thing as it being true.
This still carries on to some extent with the campaign and even the multiplayer. But the sky really is falling of the best your game has going for it is that we might have Forge a year after launch and I am not impressed by a Co-Op beta. The weird multiplayer season story they’ve got going which instead of helping set the stage is wasting time with an out of context and weird side story. Never mind the rumour that they won’t have any campaign content until 2025.
Underwhelming and half baked. You can say about almost everything in the game.
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Finally, a good statement I say victoriously in a Gordon Ramsey voice
As a fan it is pretty depressing. I want 343 to succeed but the fact Microsoft has not put all their weight behind 343 and given them an unlimited budget to hire a Assassins Creed size team to get this done tells me they don’t believe in either 343 or Halo anymore.
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I mean the rumours suggest they were given a ton of money and time. No idea how much an Assassins Creed game costs to make.
I’ve said it before but it’s not like they just churned out a Halo 5.5 in 2017 to course correct. They had six years and very little to show for it.
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Nah, the Bungie today earned that especially since Activision dropped them like a bad habit. 343 will be right under them used as an example on what not to do for literally trying to follow them in their footsteps.
Going by what Activision’s been up to lately, I’m starting wondering who dropped who.
I’m looking at the the studios Activision provided and how Destiny has majorly gone done hill since Activision left.
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Microsoft already invested in several other developers and those dev’s already have famous IPs with massive fan bases. Microsoft doesn’t need Halo or Master Chief or Joe Staten or any of this BS anymore. 343 needs Microsoft more than Microsoft needs 343 lol and 343 needs Xbox fans on their side but they never listen to us or they say they are listening but end up breaking something on accident or they change something else, Halo will never reach its potential with such an inconsistent developer working on it.
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The #1 issue, and until 343 wakes up and smells the coffee infinite will never go anywhere. Games are suppose to move forward, not backwards. That is the one thing the original bungie has over most developers these days.
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Remember: They made the money they wanted. They have achieved their goal.
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You see that article about Jerry Hook starting his own studio and taking 343 employees with him?
Maybe Microsoft didnt make what we assumed.
Next quarters earnings report hopefully will tell the tale
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I don’t think that’s the case. There are no hard numbers released, but I think a consistent population decline is sign that 343 probably isn’t making as much as they hoped too. Between Fortnite and Fallguys Epic games is probably raking in billions, with MS hoping to achieve similar numbers given their store similarities. Only so many players will buy the cat ears before it’s either vaulted again or desync pisses them off enough to play better games. With game pass Im sure the retail sale of the game’s campaign is probably a franchise low.
They made money sure, but was it enough to cover the ballooned budget and operating costs of the studio? I’d wager probably not.
They absolutely aren’t making as much money as they hoped.
Consider that putting it on game pass and making multiplayer free means they lost unit sales on a 6 year wait game.
Consider that the pop plummeted rapidly and is at best just chugging along like Halo 5 was. Only H5 had micro transactions so it easily must have made them more money.
Consider that these long seasons means you’re halving the amount of items in circulation in the store and halving your Battle Pass rent.
Also, significant dev time is going into reputation repair with getting Co-Op and Forge to work. That’s not going to necessarily make them money even if it wasn’t taking them many many months to make work.
In addition, I do remember it being said that the money from the store was meant to pay for Campaign DLC. I’ve not heard anything about it since and all indications are 2025 which sounds more like a new game. So two and two together they didn’t get enough money to finance the games support.
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I know. Just making a lame joke.
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Cause they squandered it because they didn’t know what direction to go.
Why was making a main halo game a hero shooter EVER on the table?
I mean, its nice they course corrected to something resembling halo. But why was so much time wasted on such an idea in the first place. Why is it so difficult for 343 to want to make an actual halo game.
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Didn’t Gears 5 have something similar?
Never been a big gears person, nor know big gears people. So maybe.
From my impression gears MP has changed a fair bit over time and never quite had a huge audience though. But i could be totally wrong.
I can see maybe the idea to go hero shooter after h5. If in a world where h5 did well, you have Blue Team and Firetime Osiris, ad if canon’s not a huge deal you could have brought back noble team to have a wide variety of chars even just using Spartans. Heck being a hero shooter would also open the door to Elite, Brute, and possibly even Grunt, Jackal, and Hunter characters (though given 343’s track record with playable non-spartans, i somehow doubt it).
Its not necessarily a bad idea, but it’d be better off as a spinoff game and not a main title. Fan’s made it pretty clear what they wanted after h4.
Its why infinite feels so clueless and ‘baby’s first halo’ to me, as it seems a lot of weird decisions are made without reading their audience. Its like they know the halo audience even less than they did in h4.
Basically you had your normal gears mode for multiplayer but in horde and a subset of PvP multi each character had a series of abilities that upgrade in battle. So your engineer can build barricades quicker, you have a character who can go stealth etc etc.
There’s also a micro transaction element as you can upgrade these through loot boxes to get cards which are upgradable. 
That might’ve actually been a neat idea, provided classic pvp was preserved.
In a way Reach had something similar with the Elites being treated as a diff character with their own related modes.