Handing Halo to Activision Makes Business Sense, but Is That Enough to Save the Series?

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy” and has reviewed several Halo games, including the Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite .

I’ll give Asha Sharma this: she is not afraid to shake things up. Whether you love or hate how she’s run the Xbox business in her first six months as CEO so far, there are no sacred cows with her. Whether it’s slashing Xbox Game Pass prices, nuking an unpopular marketing campaign, restoring console exclusives, telling Obsidian to make a damn Fallout game already , or signing Hideo Kojima after PlayStation cancelled Physint, she is more than willing to flip over some tables to try and get Xbox to a better place. Unfortunately, these decisions have also come paired with a lot of layoffs . To say the situation for all at Xbox is changing would be to put it very lightly.

When it comes to the very fundamentals of Xbox’s game DNA, though, Sharma’s latest power move is arguably her most earthshaking one yet. The next mainline Halo will be developed by Activision. Meanwhile, Halo Studios – the series’ custodians since 2011 – has been hit with significant layoffs.

Read that again. Halo Studios, once known as 343 Industries – the developer founded purely to create Halo games – will no longer be the creative drivers behind Halo. The keys to the Warthog have been taken away and given to Activision, makers of Call of Duty and the crown jewel of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition . The company had to crawl through regulatory broken glass in order to get approval for such a move, so I suppose this is one way to help further justify that kind of expense.

This doesn’t reflect well on Xbox’s handling of Halo over the past 15 years. You know you f*cked up pretty bad when the developer that was renamed to Halo Studios less than a year ago is now no longer making the next big Halo game. Like, holy shit. Let that sink in for a minute. But from where I sit, Halo Studios’ issues have never been with raw talent. I absolutely loved Halo 4’s campaign that centered on Master Chief and Cortana’s relationship, but its multiplayer failed to live up to the Halo standard. The opposite happened with Halo 5, whose awful campaign sat alongside a phenomenally good multiplayer. And Halo Infinite finally put two great halves together …for a minute, until the modern needs of maintaining a living multiplayer shooter couldn’t be met by the studio.

Instead, the problem has always seemingly been with management. From a reported reliance on an ever-cycling crop of contractors, to having to onboard every one of those said contractors with Halo’s proprietary Blam/Slipspace engine, it made the studio wildly inefficient. I’ve also personally heard from a well-placed source in the past week that leadership is “ineffective” and “makes me facepalm on a regular basis.”

But one source does not a complete narrative make. Let’s instead look at the results. We are already less than three months away from Halo Infinite’s fifth anniversary. And, based on the “reboot” of 343 Industries under the new Halo Studios name, its change of leadership, and shift from the proprietary Slipspace engine to Unreal Engine 5, the chances that the existing development structure could ship a new big Halo game in the next five years seems slim at best.

Sharma, who has already made it clear she wants Xbox to take a franchise-first approach to what it invests its resources into, must’ve come to the same conclusion. Giving the series to Activision says one thing above all else to me: she wants a Halo game soon. And Activision, whether you love it or hate it, does have a pretty sterling track record of getting big-budget blockbuster games done in a timely fashion. They’re not always great games (see last year’s Black Ops 7), but they’re usually at least pretty good, and they always ship on time. Has a Call of Duty ever missed a holiday ship date? Not that I can recall – that’s the power of multiple support studios working together.

So from that purely business perspective, handing Halo to Activision makes perfect sense. But what about creatively? That’s a more difficult question to answer. Activision undoubtedly has a ton of talent in-house, but Infinity Ward doesn’t seem like it’ll be escaping the Call of Duty salt mines anytime soon after successfully rebooting itself over its last few projects. Sledgehammer, meanwhile, has seemingly fallen out of favor following its tenure on some of Call of Duty’s weakest projects in recent years – Vanguard and Modern Warfare 3. But then again, Microsoft didn't say it was forming a new studio for Halo. It specifically used the term "purpose-built team." To me, that strongly suggests that a new team will be formed within an existing Activision studio that can plug directly into the established development pipeline. That leaves two likely candidates in my eyes: Treyarch and Raven.

Treyarch has arguably been Activision’s most dependable cash factory since it first created the Black Ops sub-franchise back in 2010. It was a success story born out of disaster, following Infinity Ward’s implosion and much of the studio’s founding team departing to form Respawn. Black Ops went on to become the flagship brand for many Call of Duty fans, particularly following the titan that was BLOPS 2. That winning streak came to a screeching halt last year, though, when Black Ops 7 released to middling reviews and disappointing sales . Perhaps that’s the signal that Treyarch needs a new focus. Interestingly, the studio recently said that it was “ ready to make something new ,” a quote which looks awfully suspicious given Sharma’s latest big move.

Putting Treyarch in charge of Halo would, in my opinion, be the safest move. Halo needs help, and Treyarch has been Activision’s most reliable studio that has a proven track record of elevating the world’s biggest franchise.

There’s another possibility, though: Raven Software. The pride of the Wisconsin game development scene has been stuck on Call of Duty for what feels like an eternity, but before that, its resume consisted of some absolute bangers. Heretic, Hexen, Quake 4, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, Star Wars Jedi Knight 2, Soldier of Fortune, and the 2009 Wolfenstein reboot are all examples of its FPS pedigree. Putting Raven in charge of Halo would be the bolder pick, if you ask me, and I’d be fired up if the studio got the call. And of course, it's also quite possible that this new team will pull talent from multiple Activision studios, but again, based on the way Microsoft worded it, I'd be willing to bet lunch that it's a new team within one of Activision's existing studios.

No matter who’s developing the next mainline Halo game, however, this move only makes me even more confident in a prediction I’ve been making for a while now on Podcast Unlocked: that the next major Halo game isn’t going to be Halo 7, or a sequel to Halo Infinite. It feels like far too much time has passed for a direct successor to make sense. Instead, I think what’s next is going to be a reboot.

A lot of Halo fans understandably hate the idea of the series starting afresh, but honestly, I think it’s time – especially now that the franchise is changing hands. By the time Activision is ready to roll, we’ll be 30 years deep, give or take, into the Halo canon. There are entire generations of players who missed out on some of Master Chief’s most important chapters. And considering Campaign Evolved was surely Halo’s first and last appearance on a PlayStation console, now that Sharma has made exclusives a priority again, a re-run of those formative years for a wider audience of players is no longer necessary. The reality is that it will be a new team picking up the mantle following a multi-year pause in Halo’s story, and that team is going to have its own ideas.

Campaign Evolved isn’t just a dead end when it comes to re-establishing the canon – it’s potentially also a technological loose end. Think about it: if one of the Call of Duty studios takes over, and Sharma wants Halo back on shelves as quickly as possible, you’d only slow that team down by having them pivot to Campaign Evolved’s Unreal Engine 5 when they’ve spent the past 15+ years working with Call of Duty’s proprietary tools. Those teams’ entire development pipelines are built around the bespoke IW engine and its unified toolset. And, for all the creative faults you could pick with Call of Duty, it’s hard to criticize them from a technical perspective. There’s almost zero chance that process gets messed with. Take all of that together and I just don’t see Activision picking up where Halo Studios left off in any way, be it narratively or otherwise.

So, can Activision save Halo? The cynical answer would be, “Well, they can’t do any worse.” But the real answer is: maybe. It depends on which studio and which team is entrusted with this billion-dollar task. Halo was the biggest first-person shooter series in the world before being dethroned by Call of Duty. How crazy is it that the very same people who defeated it are now being asked to resurrect it? If I’m being honest, though, as talented as Treyarch and Raven are, neither would be my first in-house pick at Xbox to revive Halo. I’d pick id Software (who might be done with Doom for now ) or MachineGames (who is reportedly busy with the conclusion to its Wolfenstein series). But both Treyarch and Raven are fully capable. Here’s hoping that whoever’s name is on the next Halo understands the assignment and is afforded every resource available to get it done properly.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked , and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch . He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan .

Editor's note: this story has been updated to better reflect Microsoft's plans to have Halo developed by "a new, purpose-built team".