Three years between main franchise installments is practically an unheard of practice in the age of Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed. Microsoft appears to be taking a cue of out Activision’s book when the Vice President of Microsoft Game Studios Phil Spencer told IGN that future entries in its blockbuster Halo series would be coming more frequently.
“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.” Spencer said, “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.”
He continued, “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. 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…I used to look at annual releases of non-sports games as people just trying to milk me. 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.” Spencer concluded.
MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Seriously a good game takes time to make. I know MS wants money, but over saturating the fans with Halo games will diminish its appeal to people. There are a lot of Mario games made, however Nintendo observes that 2-3 year or so window when it comes to a specific dimension of Mario games on a platform (see SMG and SMG2, also see NSMBW). Granted it had been 15 years since the last 2D Mario on a home console, Nintendo does good to not over saturate (Mario aside as he is the mascot) a certain game on a platform.
Microsoft, seriously observer the 2.5-3 years to make a quality game to preserve the quality that Bungie put into the series, and to not make Halo too repetitive. Also Halo should stay as an FPS to make sure the other genre game doesn’t suck (what you guys did to Ensemble with Halo Wars was just not cool, cause I really want a quality AOE, not this AOE online stuff that detracts from the series).