As you may recall, 343 Industries was hit with layoffs both last year and earlier this year, and there has been talk of big changes. Now, the usually reliable Halo source Bathrobe Spartan, who claims to have spoken to people from the studio, has shared information about the situation.
Apparently, the number of employees is now just over half of what it was and they have gone from 500 to 280 people. Microsoft reportedly doesn’t have the same confidence in them anymore, and has therefore started outsourcing more development work. This reinforces the information that Unreal Engine will be used for the series in the future, as it is much easier to outsource Unreal work than for a proprietary graphics engine.
343 Industries will instead lead the development and produce concepts (similar to Halo Wars 2, which was developed by Creative Assembly under the direction of 343 Industries), rather than developing themselves – although 30% of the workforce is still working on actual development. They are currently working on two Halo games, one of which is a remake of the first game in the series, while the other is Halo 7. Supposedly, it will have a significantly higher number of players than before, and perhaps this is the legacy of Certain Affinity’s famous – but seemingly cancelled – battle royale project?
However, neither is expected to be released until 2026 at the very earliest, so we suspect that they will be games for the already confirmed next generation Xbox. Microsoft is also holding onto the budget in a different way than before, because although Halo Infinite made a lot of money, it was still less than expected. This is said to make it more difficult to hire new staff.
As this is all unconfirmed information, take it with the usual amount of caution for now.