Former Halo Developer Blames 'Incompetent Leadership' For Layoffs At 343 Industries

This isn't a surprise at all. Bad leadership can ruin everything.

All you have to do is look at Halo Infinite to know he’s correct.

I like Halo Infinite MP well enough, but it's fair to say the game could have had a smoother launch. Hell, post launch hasn't been great for a lot of people.

@Kaloudz At this point, it has become a game of every side pointing fingers at each other, and honestly without some deep insight into the studio, I think it is hard to say exactly which groups are at fault.
The biggest challenge 343 faces are IMO Halo fandom itself. After Halo 5 a certain narrative has developed that they are incompetent and don't deserve to have Halo and despite all the best efforts of Infinite in all areas (graphics, art design, soundtrack, storytelling, etc.) they haven't been able to shake that off. They are a studio that is forever in a loop trying to course-correct and pander to their fans. No other FPS studio has to worry about how people feel about the universe and lore of games quite the way 343 has to, because all other FPS are just "military dude kill bad dude" anyway. Handling a grand hard sci-fi franchise like Halo is hard and as proven by case of Crysis, Killzone, Resistance and others, the studio is lucky they even got this far.

@FatalBubbles That's sad, but true unfortunately....

@BrilliantBill The thing you should remember is that this problem isn’t just unique to 343…it’s every MS first party studio. They’re all in a state…either fallen apart, like the initiative. Had games delayed, cancelled, or completely started from scratch since first shown…like pretty much every studio under them, most recently Rare.

Xbox has had a huge problem for generations now…that they keep throwing money at hoping that that will fix. Meanwhile studios continue to mainly exist without structure and focus…leading to games rarely being released and ultimately what we’re now seeing…layoffs.

Meanwhile Phil Spencer continues to win awards.

Luckily the problem can only get better with them taking on aload more studios and staff…

343's days are numbered. Bonnie Ross was well respected at Microsoft so she was able to shield them through all the crap. But with her gone it's open season.

With Microsoft owning multiple legendary FPS franchises (Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein) and Call of Duty on the way i can't see them caring much about Halo anymore.

Personally I quite liked Halo 5 and Halo Infinite. I don't really understand the bashing, I guess there should be more multiplayer content but otherwise it's pretty good.

@Kaloudz employees do what the management decide. so primarily it is a management issue. could the employees do a better job? perhaps, but its harder to do that with bad management. something that gets mentioned about xbox studios regularly.

points to something higher up being wrong.

@Kaloudz Maybe it is a situation where things need to get worse before they get better. So hopefully from now on the management from Microsoft will be more intense and hands-on.
Regarding the cost of development of Infinite reaching 500 million, I don't know, wasn't it just a rumour? is there any solid leaker out there confirming it cost this much? Passing Halo to another studio will also probably be a case of "careful what you wish for". Any other studio will imprint their own gameplay and designs on Halo probably and will start another whole can of worms about how the new studio is making their old game just reskinned as Halo.

@Bleachedsmiles I doubt they meddle too much with Bethesda and eventually Activision. As long as they leave them as it is. It should be ok.

@robe Out there on the /Halo reddit and YouTube, generally 5 is treated as a disaster, and Infinite is treated only slightly better. Opinions towards Halo 4 have softened over the years partially due to nostalgia and partially due to its great story. But all in all, none of 343s game managed to unite the fandom, it is more fractured than SW fandom.

Obviously 343 as the developer f***** up massively but as the head of Xbox game studios Phil Spencer should share alot of the blame god knows he gets credited enough anytime there's good news for Xbox

@somnambulance totally agree especially about untouchable phil.

that aside i think gamers are getting fed up in general, be it live service, mtx, delays, products releasing unfinished/poor state. alot of good will is going to be lost, MS need to nail their big 3. Hopefully the bethesda ones arent their usual bugfest

@BrilliantBill maybe…I mean that’s the real reason they’re buying publishing houses rather than just developers isn’t it?…to help ensure games actually come out. The problem is the difference between working effectively for yourself and working for somebody else - you generally try harder when working for yourself. So these publishers have been getting games out consistently before MS now suddenly have a big bag of money to rely on regardless of hitting release dates…this will naturally lead to games getting more delays. I mean last year we already saw this with Bethesda…how often did they miss their release dates by a year before being acquired by MS.
Usually delays are good for the gamer at the end of the day…which any other publisher this is true. MS however it’s not…nearly every game they’ve announced since Phil Spencer has seen long delays and ultimately still been released half baked. It’s easy enough to track as there’s been so few games…but the big ones have been crackdown 3 and recently halo.
Of course there’s some out liars under MS …playground games have appeared to be competent in getting games out regardless of MS management. And the coalition was pretty productive last gen. But you do get a sense that there’s been a realisation amongst ms game studios that with ms’s hands off approach they can simply get paid for doing very little… helped all the more by the backlash towards ‘crunch culture’ in recent years. When 500+ people can’t steadily regularly release content you know somebody is taking the piss.
And now of course they’ll complain about lack of management when they’re no longer reaping the rewards of that lack of management.

@robe I liked halo infinite too actually. But when you consider the money invested in it. The extra year delay and it still being released missing main features. And general lack of content and variety…something clearly went wrong.
And then when they’re pushing a live service version of it with the mp but failing to regularly support it…then it you start to get the backlash.

And now that they’re going to be charging £70 for these games then expectations in them should grow with the price. Of course ms have the shield of gamepass to rely on…but that will get a price rise too soon enough.

@somnambulance Man, you've said it all! I've never been into the backstage of the industry, I was just an average guy who was into gaming. And while I've been quite satisfied with Gamepass, I always felt something was a bit "off" with Microsoft, since the end of the Xbox One era (I got one late, by 2019, I guess).
Now, in 2023, after owning a Series S for a yearvand a half and after been around this website for some time, I realize how unacceptable the situation is: MS's gaming division is a multi-billion operation, and still, they can't show consistent, original, quality content?
I wonder what they're lacking...talent, motivation, leadership, or a sum of all those?
Or perhaps they're satisfied with the 3rd place and that's it?
Regardless, I'll still support MS for a bit more, but honestly, if the PS5 wasn't so damn expensive here in Brazil, I guess I would've already pulled the trigger.
Well, 2023 is supposed to be THE year for Xbox, right?

@Bleachedsmiles All the points that you have raised are very valid. Specially this bit: "now of course they’ll complain about lack of management when they’re no longer reaping the rewards of that lack of management."
Xbox definitely needs to tighten the grips and force a focused and lean approach to develop and shipping games.

Confirming what many of us here have speculated over the past couple of years.

@Kaloudz

Developers that don't know what they're doing, developers that drag their heels, and developers that are not in touch with the community, are also at fault. Just my two cents.

I think when they say upper management, they mean upper management within 343, not within XBox or Microsoft.

This goes hand in hand with developers never being actually in change of anything, it is management that is in charge of deciding directions. When players say "developers that are not in touch with the community" it's actually a manager that made calls that go counter to the community despite what the community (and often even the dev team) thinks.

A very good example of this is WoW. Various leads for years ignored the player base and forced their ways on the game, even their teams were against it but you cant go against leadership. Eventually the problematic leaders in question were kicked out the door, and under new leadership, now WoW has one of its most successful expansions ever, and people love it.

So, yes, the problem is always leadership. Hell, if a dev is dragging its heels and does not get fired, that is also a leadership issue.

@somnambulance

This generation so far has ultimately made me a bigger fan of Nintendo overall, simply because they tell you a game is releasing, it does

Metroid Prime 4 (announced 2017)
Bayonetta 3 (announced 2017)
Breath of the Wild 2 (announced 2019)
Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp (permanently in limbo)

I mean, think about how harshly he talked about Sony with the $70 price point on games and then Xbox goes and does the same thing.

Do you have a quote or link to XBox actually talking harshly about this? Because all I recall xbox reps (including Phil) say at the time was simply along the lines of "we have nothing to announce at this time" or the such. I have always assumed the reason they didnt do a price increase the same way Sony did was because it messing with the whole Smart Delivery strategy and promise, where Sony taxed its players for a white PS5 label in the box, and forbid them from ever playing their multi-plat games on a PS4 if they paid more.

The only thing Phil Spencer gave lip service to was the increase in price to the hardware.

We know. We've been saying that for years now. We're just impressed it has taken so long.

343 was never meant to make games. They were there to run and maintain Waypoint.

Now we're a decade in and they've given us 3 bad games and a garbage television show.

@OldgamerDave

MS's gaming division is a multi-billion operation, and still, they can't show consistent, original, quality content?
I wonder what they're lacking...talent, motivation, leadership, or a sum of all those?

Xbox started seriously acquiring studios in 2018 with Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Compulsion, Playground, Inexile and Obsidian. Added Double fine in 2019 and ZeniMax in 2020.

It usually takes a Triple-A game about 6-10 years to be made from scratch, sequels can potentially take less time since they are building on top of an existing foundation. Arround 3-4 years for Triple-A sequels.

The truth is the acquired studios simply have not had enough time under ownership to deliver exclusive games. Most these studios were tied up in pre-existing arrangements for either multi-platform games or, in cases like Deathloop, PlayStaton timed exclusives.

2023 marks the 5 year since this acquisition spree started. It's a miracle of timing that Xbox will get a big exclusive out of the ZeniMax deal "just" 3 years after acquisition simply because Starfield had been under development for so long and Sony never managed to lock an exclusivity deal for the game (we know they were trying.)

@somnambulance

and Bungie (who were willing to sign up with Sony behind MS’s back)

There were a lot of rumors going around for a while about Bungie going around trying to find a buyer. They denied it, over and over, but obviously it was true since they ended up selling to Sony. Among those rumors, it was said that they talked to Phil about it but it was a hard pass for XBox.

This deal didn't happen "behind MS's back", Sony was Bungie's rebound pick after being rejected by Xbox.

@Kaloudz I'm old and as a dev I have worked for small and large companies, goverments from local to state to fed levels. For the most part, whenever "higher ups" get involved (as in a whole new layer from the studio/component/division/etc) the options tend to be:

A) do you need more resources to finish X?
B) Should we axe X?
C) You are fired, we getting someone else in charge.

I think we can make a case that Bonnie Ross should had been fired way earlier (lets face it, there is no way she just left due to personal reasons, I wont ever stop believing she was asked to turn in her resignation.) MS still seemed to had decided to do something about things when they had to delay Halo Infinite for a year, when they basically sent Joe Staten to oversee that extended period.

I can see, in part, how Ross got away with it for so long because I have seen similar. It might sound counterintuitive, but when you are in charge of one of the tentpoles of the company, there can be a lot more resistance to just kick them out and put someone new in charge. Devil you know kind of thing.

Maybe had XBox have had more tentpoles besides Halo/Gears/Forza, they would had felt more empowered to do drastic changes to 343.

When you have employees like snickerdoodle, what do you expect?

Hope she is one shown the door with those layoffs. Horrible person.

@Tharsman Thanks for the fresh perspective, friend. I know you can't "rush art", still... half a decade seems a lot for fans to wait.
But then again, MS has virtually unlimited funds. So, maybe they could expand their teams, promote a higher level of integration and optimization of tasks, without necessarily crunch... THAT is the challenge of MS leadership!

@somnambulance I'm on the same boat: I've been on Xbox since the 360 days, and I still trust them, but the clock's ticking and many veterans may be very close to the edge, depending on how 2023 turns out to be. But again: I really hope this will FINALLY be Xbox's moment to shine!

@OldgamerDave see Brook's Law:

adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

More manpower might help a project early on, but not necessary too late in.

A funny counterintuitive thing that some might consider proves mismanagement from XBox management, is Starfield's delay. I honestly think Starfield would had launched on its scheduled date had ZeniMax still be an independent publisher, not because the game would had been ready by then, but because they would have not had the money to continue development without shipping. It could had been a Cyberpunk scenario.

@Tharsman Another deep insight, friend! I saw in one of your comments you saying that you're a developer - and that changes things in my book. I'll follow your comments closer and hopefully learn more about this field. Cheers!

The entire 343 studio should be shut down.

They're awful and have failed with every single product they have ever made.

@OldgamerDave for clarity, I'm not an XBox game dev, I am mostly an old fashioned boring software dev that has worked in a few game projects for PC and mobile, never for console.

On the topic of 343, from what I hear there is a policy issue with contractor term limits. I have been trying to google up the source of this but cant find anything official, but the claims are that due to some labor laws, contractors have an 18 month term limit. I am not sure if this is exclusive to 343 or a Microsoft wide thing.

Among all the management choices that impacted Halo Infinite development, losing contract developers after this 18 month mark is often highlighted. Thats a huge loss on experience and knowledge that can set back any project back.

I have not heard of any other of their studios having issues due to this. For what its worth, the Coalition is in Vancouver, Canada, and Playground Games is in the UK, but Turn 10 Studios is also in Redmond, Washington. Would be interesting to know why we don't hear about them having similar issues. Maybe they have a smaller ratio of contractors? 🤷

@Tharsman Still, the fact that you work as a dev brings a higher level of understanding on the topic, that I won't pretend to possess. Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts: it helps me to have a more informed opinion on the "xbox has no games" issue.

@somnambulance what I heard, months (hell think up to a year) before Sony acquisition was that they had talks, and MS simply determined they wanted too much money for what they brought to the table, and too much independence. It does seem Sony was happy to give them both.

Honestly, for Sony the deal might be seen a lot more sensible since it brought with it the Destiny IP for movies and animation purposes, an angle that meant nothing for XBox since they don’t own movie or animation studios and would rely on third parties (like Paramaunt for Halo.)

I have heard this spiel countless times, yes leadership can ruin things but the ppl at the ground can also.

These past Halo games have been a mess and broken too. Their inability to communicate with the fans and broken promises.

End of the day, it does suck when people lose their job(s). Criticizing a studio is fair, but to a point they lose their jobs is terrible.

Half right. The franchise should have been taken off the studio years ago. Well before they even started Infinite. That's pretty bad management.