As the games industry grapples with Xbox laying off 3200 workers and dropping five studios, more voices are surfacing to tell tales about corporate fumblings in the past.
Dan Callan – who was recently laid off from his position as staff designer at Bungie – shared on Bluesky an anecdote about demoing Halo 4 for former Xbox boss Don Mattrick. You’ll probably remember him as the main face behind the brand during Xbox One’s “TV TV TV” debacle before he departed the company and Phil Spencer came in.
As Callan recalls, he was showing a mission he’d worked on when Mattrick suggested that maybe the game’s campaign could use a “real money auction house for campaign mech skins”, a bit like Diablo 3‘s ill-fated experiment that severely damaged the game and brand’s reputation.
According to Callan: “Every single human being around him reacted like this was an amazing groundbreaking idea… while simultaneously realising this was the stupidest shit imaginable since everyone with a brain had seen how hard that blew up in their face and the game was 90 percent done.”
Halo 4 never did launch with a real-money auction house, of course, and Don Mattrick left Microsoft and Xbox in 2013, the year after Halo 4 launched. It’s unclear exactly how the team talked Mattrick down from the real-money auction house idea.
“So yeah game execs remain stupid detached money grubbing idiots,” Callan concluded. Then he added: “This isn’t even the dumbest thing that was said that day.”
Xbox’s latest round of layoffs and strategic shift has resulted in Double Fine (Psychonauts, Keeper) and Compulsion Games (We Happy Few, South of Midnight) going independent and keeping their properties. Meanwhile, Undead Labs (State of Decay series) and Ninja Theory (Hellblade) are being moved to new ownership while also retaining the rights to their games. Bethesda studios – like ZeniMax Online and id Software – have also been hit with deep cuts.
Halo Studios is currently preparing to launch Halo: Campaign Evolved later this month, but it’s unclear if its teams will remain unaffected by further (delayed) cuts after the launch date even if Xbox reportedly wants more Halo games.
