Rebs Gaming has come out with an insider report on the state of Halo Studios before they were closed down this week: - Xbox has laid off almost the entire Halo Studios team with only 30 employees remaining, these include engineers, artists, designers and support personnel. - There were NO Halo games in full production at Halo Studios/343i, despite Halo Infinite being nearly 5 years old - There were some Halo games in the very early concept stages with no major work done, these were: Halo 2 Remake, Halo 3 Remake, Halo 7 and a Halo spin-off game based on the "First Strike" novel - First Strike takes place between Halo CE and Halo 2, and was intended to connect Halo CE and Halo 2 more effectively - First Strike was planned as a smaller, quick release game in-between large releases, with only 5 campaign missions, a Firefight mode and was planned to be finished and released by next year - Halo Studios was considering a strategy of adapting Halo novels into smaller games inbetween the major remakes - Halo 7 was reportedly still many years away, only a small team was working on the concept and overall vision - Right before the lay-offs, developers did reportedly present the concept of Halo 7 to Xbox execs, which included Campaign, PvP, PvE and Forge all at launch - The remaining Halo Studios team wants to also exploring using AI tools to help create smaller Halo projects, while outsourcing development of Halo remakes and potentially still make Halo projects internally - A source of Rebs claims that Activision has 0 intention to work with Pierre Hintze, the current leader of Halo Studios, Making it unlikely they'll ever work on a new Halo game again - Reb's sources strongly criticize Pierre Hintze's leadership and Matt Booty's, with a general lack of accountability across Xbox Game Studios sited as a major issue - They also speculate that Halo Studios will probably be eventually fully shut down Honestly, my thoughts on all this is: I am not surprised. Halo Studios aka 343 Industries' leadership alongside the old Xbox team's incompetence in controlling their studios caused Halo's downfall. There is a ton of talent at Halo Studios that clearly wanted to make great Halo games, but the higher ups and then Xbox above them consistently did nothing for years and years. The fact that Halo 7 to this day, 5 years since Infinite, was just a concept, is insane to think about. Asha Sharma 100% did the right thing ending this entire charade and giving the IP over to Activision. Despite all of Activision's issues, they run Call of Duty like a machine and there is ALWAYS new content and games for COD. Meanwhile, Halo is just collecting dust with a whole studio dedicated to it that's seemingly ended up producing nothing other than a subpar remake in 5 years. An entire generation does not know Halo or enjoy it because there is practically nothing coming from this franchise. For so many years, I constantly voiced my frustrations with Xbox and their handling of their studios. Could Halo Studios' closure have been avoided? Yeah, If Phil Spencer and other execs actually took charge and got this studio to make a Halo 7 in the past half a decade. But now, it's just too late. RIP Halo Studios