After the release of Halo 3, the franchise has seen the release of Halo Wars, Halo 3: ODST and now Halo: Reach. Regardless of how one thinks of those games, it’s the sort of pace that Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Game Studios Phil Spencer would like to continue.
“There’s no explicit strategy that says we’re to ship a Halo game every year. I will say I think one Halo game every three years — which was kind of our old cadence is probably not frequent enough, said Spencer. “We’re coming up on, what, next year is the 10th anniversary. You watch the change in gamers in 10 years. The percentage of players who are playing Reach that were I’ll say not old enough to play Halo 1 at the time, 10 years is a long time between launches. We definitely think about a more persistent Halo engagement for customers and not going dark for two years, and Live helps obviously with multiplayer to keep people engaged.”
“343 Industries is thinking a lot about how to take this franchise and turn it into something that people feel like they have an ongoing relationship with and they can entertain themselves more often, added Spencer. But it’s not, hey every November 6 or whatever we have to ship a game and build a production plan around that. We want to do things that make sense as a first party.”
This strategy might sound akin to what Activision has done with Call of Duty, and Spencer had nothing but praise for what Activision has done. “I’ll just, again, be honest as a gamer. I used to look at annual releases of non-sports games as people just trying to milk me, described Spencer. I figured nobody had enough time to do a good job, and all of the negatives that we would associate with those kinds of scenarios. Kudos to Activision because they’ve done a good job building a good game, continuing to release each year and I think the fans feel like it’s a good thing that they do that. I think there are some things to learn, some positives and some opportunities, in what they do with that. Obviously they’ve kept the quality extremely high, which I think is important.”
“We have some unique challenges and opportunities with Halo because it is a story based game built around a certain set of characters, which is a bit different than what they do with Call of Duty. Not better or worse, it’s just different. But watching them and seeing what they do — we take inspiration from a lot of places — but obviously they’re a big success, he conlcuded.
Source: IGN
