More Frequent Halo Releases Coming from Microsoft?

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Microsoft Game Studios corporate vice president Phil Spencer told IGN that a three-year cycle for new Halo releases "is probably not frequent enough."

Though there was only a year between Bungie's last two releases--Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST--the gap between those two titles and Halo 3 clocked in at two years. However, Phil might be forgetting that Halo Wars was released in February 2009, putting the true gap at around 17 months.

It's true that there were three years between Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3, but it appears that this strategy of more frequent Halo releases has already been realized by Microsoft.

When asked about Activision's annual releases in the Call of Duty franchise, Spencer had praise for the publisher.

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. 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.

Despite all of this, "there's no explicit strategy that says we're to ship a Halo game every year," said Spencer. With the franchise reins shifting over to Microsoft's 343 Industries, the door is open for just about anything as far as Halo goes.

"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." I think the Daily Challenges in Halo: Reach are a good example of this, but I'm sure Microsoft has bigger plans. Could this be the rebirth of the canceled Halo MMO project?

From The Chatty
  • reply
    September 22, 2010 12:23 PM

    so why haven't they released halo 1 and 2 on GFWL yet? seems like a no-brainer

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      September 22, 2010 12:51 PM

      They'll blame it on software piracy.

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      September 22, 2010 12:54 PM

      That would be like printing free money.

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      September 22, 2010 2:50 PM

      they have...you can play them right now for probably 10 dollars each. all the halo 2 guys on xbox migrated to the pc version.

      the only ones they haven't released on PC are halo 3...odst..halo wars..and now reach. i would love to see those on the PC too.

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        September 22, 2010 3:17 PM

        i mean on the actual GFWL client.

        and I would too, they should make them GFWL exclusive. boom, microsoft has it's killer app. it's a goddamn no-brainer.

        • reply
          September 22, 2010 6:59 PM

          Halo 2 on PC *is* GFWL exclusive. Problem is, it's also Vista/Windows 7 exclusive.

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      September 23, 2010 2:18 AM

      Halo 2 seems to be broken with the newer GFWL client though

      game says the client is already in use or some crap like that.

      there is a fix but it requires deleting some kb files and crap like that, no thank you

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