This is a summary of the long thread from Bathrobe Spartan which you can find here: https://x.com/BathrobeCast/status/1812578845108625769
343 kept losing people in 2023 & 2024. Lead to more outsourcing content. Contracts not being renewed. 50-60 people let go on top of the >100 laid off.
Some roles transferred to MS/Xbox Team instead of being internalized at 343.
343 still relying on contractors, staff are not pleased to see leadership has not learned from the production of Infinite.
Less than 280 employees as of May 2024, with 30% of them related to Game-Content-Production, the rest are business oriented roles & producers.
Not enough positions have been opened to fill the gap from what it was before 2023. ~32 permanent positions opened in 2023 & 2024. Not enough staff to be “Production Ready”.
343’s budget has been severely impacted and controlled. This is why recruiting took longer and pushed people to leave. Key roles couldn’t be replaced in time to finish content left.
Halo Infinite didn’t meet its commercial goals but made enough to justify finishing the content already contracted with external studios, but not enough to justify doing more than was started. Quote from an ex employee “No we made money, we made a lot of money. But when I walked into the test bay to test the latest build EVERY FUCKING DAY the guy running it said “why bother, they are gonna hate it anyway” that’s demoralizing. I would love to tell you what we worked on, but I can’t and won’t, not just because of the NDA but because I’m being loyal to the company. I still want to work there. It does bother me people praise Pierre, like, who do you think mandated Forge Maps going forward…”
Partnered forge maps not being high quality is due to to 343 being tied to legal obligations to fulfil the contracts but not enough time left to polish.
As the product did not reach its commercial goal, projection implied it wasn’t worth contracting new content outside cosmetics. Meaning no new sandbox additions.
During 2023 & 2024, many employees helped other Xbox studios on their products as most Infinite content was handled by contracted studios.
343 shifting to a new production method, separating “Leading development” and Production. Hiring lead positions to do the concept and pre-production in-house & handing off the production work to other studios, similar to Halo Wars 2. Recruiting less content-creating roles and more lead profiles to test, iterate and validate content and gameplay before working with external studios to go full production. 2 studios are currently partnered to work on 2 separate projects this way. Both still in pre-production. One is a bigger scale PvP oriented project. At least 2 years before any release.
Aim of this new production method is to help produce content for games at a reliable pace and more cost effective. Hopefully won’t lead to reproducing what happened with Infinite.
Remaining 343 staff have echoed they feel like 343 Industries isn’t as much “The Home of Halo” as it was promised to them. They hope this new method of production will be the best for the franchise.
It makes me sad to see so much of AAA game dev boiled down to business metrics. I’m sure a lot of it was marketing, but that’s not the type of talk you hear in interviews and documentary footage from the big name game devs 15 years ago or more. They were focused on making a great game, not making sure their project hit ROI goals cooked up by people outside the industry with ideas divorced from reality.
The profit was the reward for a good product, not the purpose.
It seemed to be the job of good studio leadership to keep that sort of shit away from the creatives and let the creatives do what they do best as much as possible. Sure sometimes you’d end up in a situation like MGSV, where it got so over budget with no end in sight that you’d have to push it out the door, but I’d much rather have something where what’s there is polished to near perfection than these games that are 100 miles wide and an inch deep.
Yes, technically you hit your bullet point goals of having more verticality, of having an open world, more movement options, etc. On paper you can check the boxes off for all the elements you wanted to put in the game and marketed it as having. But if each of those elements is only the bare minimum to meet the metric and move on, then they’re going to suck. Sucess as defined by pure business process rather than any measure of actual quality.