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Halo Has Not Met Financial Expectations - Brad Sams

Cmon you know that shit was just hype campaign, the game hasn’t stood the test of time at all and it came out not even a year ago.
Maybe, maybe not. The game launched with an awesome and fun campaign, felt so good. The MP was good and a lot of fun, some of the most fun I ever had. You realize the game launched at the end of 2021, so all the awards and praise it received was fresh, the game hadn't stagnated yet without more content and fixes, which are the issues we are seeing today.

Like I said, if the game had right proper post-launch support, the game would still be a chart topper. We are approaching a year from release. If they dropped the campaign co-op, local splitscreen, fixed the online issues, and kept dropping more content every few months, people would be in love.
 
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Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
Halo infinite is a great game bad service. The gunplay is only behind doom in terms of feel and fairly ahead of any of its current contemporaries.

The public doesn't care about "gunplay feel". I've never heard anyone playing Overwatch, Fortnite, Destiny, Call of Duty, Apex Legends etc talk about gunplay feel.

I'm always amazed when this is brought up because it's such a non issue IRL.

Halo was bad off the jump because it was repetitive and did nothing different from the last 7 Halo games. That's why people bounced so quickly.
 

XXL

Member
If true, anyone trying to spin this is a clown.

This is a MASSIVE red flag on the Gamepass Model for big games. It's fucking Halo, their literally flagship title.

At best, this shows there is some unreal levels of mismanagement going on.

Either way, it's not good.
 

jm89

Member
You mean the number of doritoes crumbs on the controller is meaningless? Phil Spencer metrics would make anything look like a success.
 
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AV

We ain't outta here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space
Halo was bad off the jump because it was repetitive and did nothing different from the last 7 Halo games.

No.

jXp7ZjF.png
 
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MS should dismantle 343i, put the mainline Halo series on Hiatus until Machine Games is ready to do it, and then give Obsidian carte blanche to make a Halo WRPG.

MS's entire handling of the Halo series has been an utter disgrace. It reached its peak with the recent garbage Halo TV series. For a company so involved in the creation of that abortion, there is no way that fucking Master Chief having sexy time with a baddy and then being lobotomized by Cortana was going to go down well with the fans. It's like the higher-up execs at MGS are just clueless about what makes the franchise actually appealing. And I'm not gonna lie, knowing MS is notorious for hiring on the basis of DE&I instead of actual raw talent, it doesn't surprise me one bit.
 

Reallink

Member
Thats Been debunked.

I do love that people still believe that 500 million number even though its been debunked but there ya go. We are in the age of bullshit can shape a narrative...

Saying that, even if the budget is 200 mill its a joke of a product. Great campaign but should be so much more.
6 years of earnest development and around 800 employees in one of the highest cost of living areas in the world. MS's actual cost per head after all the employee taxes, insurances, overhead, and retention amenities must be a minimum of $150K per person per year. You guys don't need snopes to deboonk this for you, anyone with more than a middle school understanding of business could tell you the game cost many fortunes.
 
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64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Maybe we just didn't need another Halo game after 3.
In an ideal world that would have happened and MS would instead focus on building more original and unique franchises while taking the lessons learned from halos success. Unfortunately we live in the worst time as per usual
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
Just because casuals can't put words into their ideas and elaborate them, doesn't mean they don't feel a good/bad gunplay. It's the core.

It's not about if they can put it into words or not.

It's that no one actually cares.

Ark: Survival Evolved has terrible gunplay feel and absolutely wipes the floor with Halo Infinite because Studio Wildcard understood what people play games for. (Choices)

Therefore it's not the core. It's such a distant periphery importance that it's shocking to see it come up so much on NeoGAF. Maybe it mattered in 1997. It hasn't mattered in a long time.
 

John Wick

Member
6 years of earnest development and around 800 employees in one of the highest cost of living areas in the world. MS's actual cost per head after all the employee taxes, insurances, overhead, and retention amenities must be a minimum of $150K per person. You guys don't need snopes to deboonk this for you, anyone with more than a middle school understanding of business could tell you the game cost many fortunes.
It was cheap. Only cost 20 million if you go by some of the posters on here.
 
Just because casuals can't put words into their ideas and elaborate them, doesn't mean they don't feel a good/bad gunplay. It's the core.
100%

There are aspects of games that people don't notice, don't cite when describing why they life it --- they know they do, and they know 100% when they don't. For all the hate that games like CoD get from the hardcore, nobody can say those games don't play and feel like butter.
 
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Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
A big part of the problem strikes me as the Xbox community being reticent to call out obvious problems with the way things are being run, all the while disregarding criticism from outside as being purely fanboys trying to score points.

Objectively: How are they doing with their core franchises and brands? The answer seems pretty damn obvious to me.
 

Flutta

Banned
Maybe MS could sell the IP to Sony, and Bungie could make a great Halo
They prob could make a great Halo game but I dont think Bungie wants anything to do with Halo.

The issue with Halo didnt start with infinite, the Halo franchise has been struggling for a long time. 343i just put the final nail in the coffin with infinite. Also the competition is too much already for it to even stay relevant for a long period of time. Basically Halo needs a miracle.
 
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I kept thinking of this scene from Jurassic Park when playing through Infinite and it's subsequent lack of content months later.



The series has become a hollow shell of what it used to be.
 
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Given the insistence that GP made the game successful this has broad implications. Not just for the IP but the viability of games which have large budgets.

GP is at 25 million subs at the last count prior to Halo's launch.
And what's the validity of this claim?
 

Ansphn

Member
Obviously its not a model that can support loads of AAA games. When people like my brother and friend are paying like £1. In reality Nintendo and Playstation aren’t able to support something like Gamepass, let alone Xbox which makes less money.

Luckily Xbox has MS money, otherwise they probably would of bowed out by now. So because they have loads of money to Burn and invest doesn’t mean its sustainable or successful.
Xbox can just bleed out money for 10 years and it wouldn’t make a dent in there trillions. But that isn’t exactly a reason why we should think its a good idea.

This is why its stupid to support this model for the future of the industry when clearly it hasn’t proved it can work. Whereas the old model of selling games has been going on for 3+ decades and companies like Nintendo and Playstation are selling more games then ever. 10+20+30+million sales for certain games
Facts
 

Orbital2060

Member
If true, anyone trying to spin this is a clown.

This is a MASSIVE red flag on the Gamepass Model for big games. It's fucking Halo, their literally flagship title.

At best, this shows there is some unreal levels of mismanagement going on.

Either way, it's not good.
Has nothing to do with game pass. Its just outdated gameplay.
 
Not surprised as I haven't heard a lot of positives about the MTX in the game. It's not good when you release a F2P and there isn't "worthy" things to buy...

unpopular opinion: gamers have no problem dropping $$$ on MTX, especially cosmetics, if it's good. I feel like you can do so much with these Spartans and they don't seem to have done much with it.
 
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Thirty7ven

Banned
Maybe, maybe not. The game launched with an awesome and fun campaign, felt so good. The MP was good and a lot of fun, some of the most fun I ever had. You realize the game launched at the end of 2020, so all the awards and praise it received was fresh, the game hadn't stagnated yet without more content and fixes, which are the issues we are seeing today.

Game came out November, 2021.
 
I thought the campaign was fantastic, a great proof-of-concept for open world Halo games going forward.

The rest doesn't affect me as I find Halo MP quite boring.

Same. Campaign was fantastic and open world Halo with the foundation and concept they have in place is an exciting future for Halo I very much look forward to.

I don't find MP boring, but I've never played Halo MP before in any serious way until Infinite. Infinite is by far the most I've ever played any Halo MP. Prior to that I played like 3 or 4 matches in the Halo 3 MP Beta that came with the first crackdown on 360. That's literally it.
 
Obviously its not a model that can support loads of AAA games. When people like my brother and friend are paying like £1. In reality Nintendo and Playstation aren’t able to support something like Gamepass, let alone Xbox which makes less money.

Luckily Xbox has MS money, otherwise they probably would of bowed out by now. So because they have loads of money to Burn and invest doesn’t mean its sustainable or successful.
Xbox can just bleed out money for 10 years and it wouldn’t make a dent in there trillions. But that isn’t exactly a reason why we should think its a good idea.

This is why its stupid to support this model for the future of the industry when clearly it hasn’t proved it can work. Whereas the old model of selling games has been going on for 3+ decades and companies like Nintendo and Playstation are selling more games then ever. 10+20+30+million sales for certain games

Pretty much this.
 

Del_X

Member
There's clearly people at 343i that understand the gunplay, story, and scale that this series needs. I just hope Halo 7 or whatever we get in, say, 2024 is a complete package from the outset. No excuse with the series consoles as a base.
 
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Mister Wolf

Gold Member
That's why they had to get her up outta there. Whoever opted to keep using that old ass game engine that they seem to struggle developing with gotta go too.
 

KungFucius

King Snowflake
If I did not have my consoles and was in the market to shop for one, and at November there was 2 games coming with PS having GoW and Xbox Halo.
I don't know in what kind of drug influence i had to be to buy Xbox. I want to play games not to be consoles salesman... Where the fuck is my excuse to upgrade my ancient Xbox one? Whoever had Xbox because there was 0 games tried that game and relatively quickly abandoned it.
How they expect to reach the expectations that me that is searching for a reason to upgrade they give me none?
Say that when Starfield comes out. Xbox hasn't had much released for sure, but neither has Sony. I think I will have played 3 games on my PS5 in 2022 by the time the year is over and the tail end of the SP campaign of Halo this year on Xbox(PC). Things are bad across the board with most high profile games getting delayed. No platform has really justified itself this year. It's really one of the worst years for gaming because there were so many promised releases hit with delays. That said, there were some good games peppered across the platforms.
 
6 years of earnest development and around 800 employees in one of the highest cost of living areas in the world. MS's actual cost per head after all the employee taxes, insurances, overhead, and retention amenities must be a minimum of $150K per person per year. You guys don't need snopes to deboonk this for you, anyone with more than a middle school understanding of business could tell you the game cost many fortunes.
By this logic, RDR2 cost a billion dollars to make. Complete nonsense.
 

Lognor

Banned
Saw this coming a mile away. Ever since the botched reveal, I knew halo infinite was gonna have alot of problems. I think its time to put halo to sleep. It was extremely popular and a product of its time but that time has passed.
You don't know what you're talking about. Lol. I can't
 

Pelta88

Member
Thats Been debunked.
I do love that people still believe that 500 million number even though its been debunked but there ya go. We are in the age of bullshit can shape a narrative...

Saying that, even if the budget is 200 mill its a joke of a product. Great campaign but should be so much more.

I'm stunned by the debate about dev costs.

We're literally in a thread about the marquee ip of XBOX not being able to financially recoup it's costs. All while being in a service which had a narrative of being financially viable for any game released on it. Business wise, that's cataclysmic on two fronts.

The PR around GP being viable is at the very least completely flawed. There's a ton of question we as a community now have especially when we consider that the PR Phil Spencer himself and every other exec has pushed is that GP is "the future" of gaming. The implications here are vast.

Arguing about initial devs costs is like arguing about the color of a damaged car that's been written off. Also dev costs don't account for the amount spent on marketing which is often equal to dev costs. XBOX had massive add, tv, and product buys for the first delayed release date. Add to that the other snack/food promotions that were rumoured to coincide with the game before the first delay. Halo is/was a behemoth and like any big ip had an expensive marketing machine behind it.

 
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Alan Wake

Member
Something went terribly wrong with Halo Infinite during development. I really liked the campaign, but 343i should do something else now. Give the franchise to another developer. Having the game on Game Pass day 1 didn't help sales either, I imagine. I, as a Halo fan, haven't spent a penny on it.
 

Helghan

Member
When you are mostly trying to make money on cosmetics through multiplayer gaming, maybe release more content so people keep playing your game.

I loved both the SP and MP experience, but once I finished the SP, and played MP for 2-3 weeks I was done with it. There wasn't anything new to experience anymore.
 
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MiguelItUp

Member
I'm not surprised. A lot of people were unhappy with the amount of content that was presented. A lot of people had expectations, and I don't blame them. The multiplayer itself FELT fantastic IMO. But the XP was such a damn grind, and the amount of content there just.... wasn't enough. Up until release a ton of people were worried about its development and staying power. Majority just played everything on Game Pass, I mean, again, I can't blame them. If the core mechanics of the game existed, but they delivered everything that was promised, and what fans wanted. The multiplayer had great content, monetization, and retention, etc. People would be much happier and I'm sure they game would've made financial expectations.
 

Gambit2483

Member
Something went terribly wrong with Halo Infinite during development. I really liked the campaign, but 343i should do something else now. Give the franchise to another developer. Having the game on Game Pass day 1 didn't help sales either, I imagine. I, as a Halo fan, haven't spent a penny on it.
I'm starting to think Gamepass can only be truly profitable and worthwhile for MS is if every major release has some kind of monetization scheme as part of it's foundation.

There's only so much money they can recoup from MULTIPLE multi-million dollar budgets off of just $15 a month per person
 

Hobbygaming

has been asked to post in 'Grounded' mode.
No need to spread lies. The CEO of Microsoft gaming has confirmed that they're not burning money and that Gamepass is indeed very sustainable. If you're talking about Xbox, we know that they were profitable in 2019, which was at the same time one of their worst years ever. They've only massively grown since then.
"Sustainable" for Microsoft, not the rest of the industry which is why you don't see many others doing day and date AAA releases into services
 

Banjo64

cumsessed
You mean, putting a triple AAA game with a multimillion dollar budget on game pass day 1 isn’t profitable? But Sony should take Microsoft’s advice and put all their new release games on psplus.
It’s more the shitty F2P multiplayer with no updates in 2 years that has tanked profitability.

As for single player, Ori is a higher quality series and probably cost 1/1000th of the budget or something obscene.
 

chromhound

Member
Bring back Halo into a Mature game and make the story interesting. Management was clearly the problem to attract the younger crowd. Halo is not a love story
 
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You don't know what you're talking about. Lol. I can't

It was a product of its time. Online multiplayer on console was fresh. Xbox live was fresh. Xbox and Halo owned the multiplayer audience. That quickly changed though when cod 4 came on the scene. It literally stole the audience. Coupled with bungie leaving, halo has been on decline since. Sorry if it hurts your feelings mate, but ain't my problem. Im just telling it how it is.
 

Dr.Guru of Peru

played the long game
Its always odd seeing the reaction to more recent Halo games. IMO, the 343 games have been quite a bit better than the Bungie originals and Infinite is probably my favourite. But then again, the only Bungie games I liked were Reach and ODST.
 
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