Microsoft: One Halo Game Every Three Years Not Frequent Enough

Before you go torching the internet, no, Microosft isn’t planning to annualize the Halo franchise and milk it for money.

But they believe that three years’ wait between Halo games are too long.

Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Game Studios Phil Spencer told IGN that, “There’s no explicit strategy that says we’re to ship a Halo game every year. I will say I think one Halo game every three years — which was kind of our old cadence – is probably not frequent enough.”

“We’re coming up on, what, next year is the 10th anniversary. You watch the change in gamers in 10 years. The percentage of players who are playing Reach that were I’ll say not old enough to play Halo 1 at the time, 10 years is a long time between launches. We definitely think about a more persistent Halo engagement for customers and not going dark for two years, and Live helps obviously with multiplayer to keep people engaged.”

“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. But it’s not, hey every November 6 or whatever we have to ship a game and build a production plan around that. We want to do things that make sense as a first party.”