Bungie wanted to make more than just Halo games and Microsoft was like nah yall job is to make halo games...so when their contract expired they moved on. So 343 was created to fill the void left by bungie
So Microsoft wanted to stunt Bungie's growth... even though Bungie essentially made 2 Halo MMOs in Destiny, Microsoft could of had that as an exclusive if they would have gave Bungie some freedom. MS is a terrible video game company and will never do better as long as they are still supported.
It's actually worse than this. Bungie didn't have a contract, it was fully owned by Microsoft. The higher ups of Bungie basically said, we're not gonna keep making Halo, you need to let us leave or we all quit. Microsoft had two choices, hold firm and force Bungie to make Halo and watch everyone walk out or let them leave and at least have a somewhat amicable relationship. Microsoft ran their relationship with Bungie into the ground to the point where Bungie's leadership was ready to walk out.
Yeah, one of the worst decisions ever. To think, Destiny could have been a xbox exclusive. Same thing happened with Epic, M$ completely dropped the ball with them
Yup, just like they did with Bizarre and Project Gotham Racing and Lionhead with Fable.
Well in retrospect its easy for us to say that now...but you have to look back at this in the eyes of 2007-2010.
Halo was....no hyperbole...THE shyt. It was evenly toe to toe with Call of Duty and Halo 3 and Reach were fukking MASSIVE games. So you crushing buildings and all of a sudden the developers come out saying they wanna do something else when you been looking forward to Halo 4 with the same type of success is gonna rub the company the wrong way....but Bungie wanting to express creativity is understandable too...so it was basically a rock and a hard place situation.
This is short-sighted thinking though which is why that fukking MASSIVE game is now a meme and on life support. Like
@Dallas' 4 Eva said, they should have increased Bungie's budget so that they could open up another studio that could work on other projects. They ended up being short-sighted, ruining the relationship, and having to build a whole other studio from scratch. Microsoft is a dumb ass company.
Honestly it seems like interference at the highest levels with game development for M$.
Both sequel trilogies from Gears and Halo have been straight
. When Bungie and Epic bailed I refused they didn’t hand off some kind of product roadmap / guide for these IPs.
The mismanagement and going back on promises and MTX ala gears 5 reeks of orders from on top.
Yup it is mismanagement at the highest levels. Bizarre Creations who made Project Gotham Racing said that Microsoft would constantly meddle in development and would demand new features and changes that would require additional budget and months of development time but Microsoft would demand it be done with the same budget and timeline.
"I'm not going to slag [Microsoft] off in an evil way, but obviously we worked on PGR4 for them, and I think that PGR4 was the strongest Gotham game we did - the most fully rounded. But towards the end of that project they wanted us to bring it in early, to chop six weeks off development."
Why would Microsoft's dumb ass do this to a developer?
