Debacle (Premium)

I’ve been writing about Microsoft for over 25 years, and not since Longhorn has the software giant bungled a product release this badly. This isn’t just embarrassing, it’s inexcusable.

I’m referring, of course, to Halo Infinite, the blockbuster game title that was supposed to launch alongside the Xbox Series X|S in November, kicking off a new generation of graphical and performance prowess. That didn’t happen, of course. And while it’s reasonable, in general, to argue that no software should ship before it’s ready, it’s just as reasonable, I think, to point out that Microsoft was pretending that Halo Infinite was ready to roll as recently as late July.

It was not ready: As Leo and I both observed during live coverage of a July 24 Xbox Game Showcase, Halo Infinite looked horrible, more like an Xbox 360 game than something aimed at the new consoles. It was so bad, in fact, that I had expected the graphics to suddenly explode in quality, similar to the black and white to color reveal at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. But that surprise wasn’t coming. What we saw in July was apparently as good as Halo Infinite was at that time.

At the time, Microsoft publicly claimed that the reveal of the next Halo delivered what “fans have been asking for most—gameplay. Today we showed the first look at the ‘Halo Infinite’ campaign running in real-time and representative of the power and performance of Xbox Series X … Halo Infinite is the most ambitious Halo game ever made, with an environment several times larger than the last two Halo games combined.”

Hey, maybe it is. But there was nothing in that reveal to suggest that it was at all ambitious. And the reaction from fans, predictably, was universally negative: Microsoft—and its 343 Industries, the studio that makes the Halo games now—had known about the November 2020 deadline for many months—years, most likely—and certainly had ample time to get the game ready. What was going on?

Just two weeks later, we got the first clues when Microsoft officially delayed Halo: Infinite “to 2021.” The firm claimed that the delay was due to a number of factors, but it only explicitly offered up COVID-19, the catch-all excuse of 2020. But as Brad wrote about a week later, the factors that led to this delay had little to do with COVID-19 and a lot to do with 343 taking on more than it could handle. And that the difficulties had started over months earlier. And no one said a thing internally, allowing marketing to continue churning its holiday season ad campaigns around a game that could not ship on time.

The biggest external clue to the real issue here is that Halo Infinite creative director Tim Longo left Microsoft that same month, having been summarily dismissed for bungling the launch and potentially screwing up an entire console generation in the process. His inability to bring the new Halo to market, and his team’s silence internally about the many issues the studio faced, no doubt led to Longo’s downfall. But the ramifications of this delay are ongoing. Not only did a host of third-party companies launch Halo-themed promotions this fall, but even Microsoft’s own 2020 holiday ad prominently features Halo’s Master Chief, a character that hasn’t seen a new game title since 2015.

Anyone familiar with Microsoft and its history would likely point, correctly, to Longhorn as the firm’s biggest failure and note that the Halo Infinite delay, while problematic during a time in which Microsoft has significantly expanded its investment in gaming, is perhaps not quite as earth-shattering as was the defeat of Longhorn. Fair enough.

But there is one major difference between Longhorn and Halo Infinite: Longhorn had adult leadership, and Allchin turned that product, which had been gestating as the longest development time of any Windows release, into the quickest-ever Windows release: The resulting product, Windows Vista, shipped less than 18 months after Microsoft scrapped Longhorn and started over. And while Mr. Allchin was forced to step down for taking on more than his team could handle, he at least had the class to see the project through to the end and he embarked on a months-long farewell tour as it neared completion.

Meanwhile, 343 is just shipping a game. An ambitious game, I will grant. An important game. But a game.

And it’s hard to understand how that game, which was nearing completion in July, suddenly needed another 15 months of development time, when it was then slated to be completed within a month and then ship to customers two months after that. This project wasn’t just mishandled. The mishandling was covered up. Is still being covered up.

How can we tell?

Now, Microsoft is claiming that the graphics we saw in late July were just “a work-in-progress” and that what we saw then was only supposed to demonstrate gameplay and not representative of the visuals one should expect of the final game. And that’s true, now, since Halo Infinite won’t ship until November 2021. But that was absolutely not true in July: What we saw then was Halo Infinite as it stood at the time, about a month before it was supposed to be completed.

The good news, of course, is that Halo fans will no doubt be treated to a superior graphical experience than what we would have received this past month. Hooray for all of us. But Microsoft/343 knew about the problems months ago and just pretended that all was well. And that lapse allowed the Xbox Series X|S to launch without a single next-generation AAA title, giving the PlayStation 5 an edge similar to the one it received at the previous-generation console launches several years earlier. And we all know how that went.

In a similar vein, it’s worth pointing out that Microsoft’s problems with Longhorn, combined with its internal queasiness about antitrust oversight, led to the diminishment of Windows and the PC and to the rise of mobile, web, and cloud platforms that today outstrip what was once Microsoft’s core product line. Will the Halo Infinite debacle lead to a similar industry shift? Not by itself, perhaps. But it could lead to a continuation of Sony’s dominance for sure.

At least Microsoft is poised to lead in the coming era of cloud-based game streaming, a market about which Sony has been mostly silent so far. That by itself helps make this disaster less damaging than Longhorn. But perhaps Sony will be ready with a new PlayStation cloud service by the time Halo Infinite finally ships. Then what?