Halo Infinite, Game Updates, and the Future of Xbox (Premium)

343 Industries revealed a major change in how it will update Halo Infinite going forward. Does this signal the enshittification of the title, or is this just another clue that the golden age of unlimited free video game updates is coming to a close?

It could be a bit of both.

First, the news: In a live stream Friday, 343 Industries revealed that Halo Infinite will not receive any more major updates as part of lengthy “seasons” events but will instead be supported with shorter “operations” that will run for shorter time periods and deliver much less new content. It’s likely that the amount of new content Halo Infinite receives going forward will just keep getting smaller and then disappear in time.

Given how long this game has been in the market—Halo Infinite was finally released in December 2021 after a 13 month delay—one might argue that 343 has done enough. But remember that the initial release still fell short of expectations and was missing key features, like campaign co-op and the Forge level builder. We didn’t get a “full” Halo Infinite experience until almost a year later.

But as with other big Microsoft game studio releases, there were a ton of updates. 343 rushed to fill in the blanks over five seasons of updates in the next two years, each accompanied by events, maps, game modes, and other content. And there were dozens of other smaller updates that included, among other things, most of the features that were missing at launch.

Despite all that, Halo Infinite never generated the excitement of the original game trilogy it visually and sonically emulates, and it was never clear what, if anything, could reverse the relative lack of interest given the blockbuster nature of this franchise.

Until fairly recently, 343 was expected to release a season 6 for Halo Infinite as soon as the end of January. But during this past week’s live stream, 343’s Brian Jarrard explained that things had changed. There won’t be any more seasons going forward, and 343 will now ship a smaller Halo Infinite update on January 30 called Content Update 29 (CU29) that will include a few updates and be accompanied by what’s described as “the first of three operations.” Reading between the lines a bit, it appears that these three operations will collectively deliver on everything fans had previously expected in season 6.

We might have passed that off as a simple semantic change, but then Jarrard casually dropped a little bombshell.

“We have a dedicated team working on supporting Halo Infinite and continuing to deliver coming forward,” he said during the closing minutes of the hour-long live stream. “But, yes, we also have additional teams now that are accelerating towards the future working on brand-new projects.”

Even a small hint about a possible new Halo title is interesting. As was Jarrard’s mention right after this revelation that 343 is hiring, a comment I believe was made to deflect any worry about the future of the game maker or the Halo franchise.

But Halo fans are right to wonder, as Halo Infinite has been problematic for Xbox on many levels. From a franchise perspective, the game is the culmination of a sequel trilogy of sorts that never lived up to the expectations set by the franchise’s original trilogy. Where Halo Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3 were each notable for their quality and escalating sales, the subsequent three games, Halo 4, Halo 5: Guardians, and now Halo Infinite, have all disappointed, with none outselling the Master Chief-less Halo Reach let alone Halo 3, the high point for the franchise. Worse, sales have fallen with each release since then, though the true tally for Halo Infinite is unknown thanks to its appearance in the all-inclusive Xbox Game Pass era. Only Microsoft’s accountants will ever know the truth.

But Xbox Game Pass also benefited Halo Infinite and its fans. With a six-year gap between it and its predecessor—the longest wait in franchise history—Halo Infinite arrived in a different world, one in which Microsoft has expanded the Xbox ecosystem via subscription and cloud services. And its game studios were supporting titles—whether they sold well or were middling performers—with what seemed, for a time, to be a never-ending bonanza of additional free content. Well, not free, exactly: Xbox Game Pass members pay a monthly subscription fee to cover the cost of those updates. But it’s still a unique and different approach from past strategies, in which game updates were usually delivered as paid DLC (downloadable content) drops or annual seasons passes, and then only for a single title. Xbox Game Pass subscribers get all the updates for all the games. It’s been a key benefit to the subscriptions.

But is it sustainable? And if so, for which games? It’s not surprising that Microsoft’s studios would provide multiple updates over time for popular titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator. But this strategy helped turn tier-two games like Gears of War 5, another example of a once-great franchise on the decline, and Sea of Thieves into enduring values. The expectation for Halo Infinite was that it would perform more like a Flight Simulator, given the franchise’s elite status, but it seems it’s more like those other two titles.

The problem, of course, is that blockbuster video games in successful franchises are as expensive to produce as blockbuster movies. And continuous major free updates over long periods of time can be unsustainable when a game underperforms, as Halo Infinite has. And so it appears that Microsoft is scaling back and cutting its losses.

I’m curious how or whether this impacts Halo as a franchise. But I’m even more curious to see whether this shift will impact other Microsoft game studio titles now and in the future. Xbox Game Pass is a great idea, but with just over 30 million subscribers across PC and console, it hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. That’s going to change, of course: Thanks to the incoming addition of Activision Blizzard’s titles, it will almost certainly become a no-brainer for a much wider range of gamers.

And maybe that’s the problem.

Microsoft paid $69 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard and its rich stable of blockbuster games and franchises. And that means there’s less money for other gaming-related ventures, including all that DLC that Microsoft’s studios have been pumping out for several years. With Activision Blizzard in Xbox Game Pass, that DLC, which once served as a selling point for the subscription, is no longer necessary. And so Game Pass will be both better and worse thanks to the acquisition, I bet.

If Microsoft is cutting its losses on a Halo title that was once the face of the platform, it’s difficult to imagine it will support other games with much in the way of additional free content. The value of Xbox Game Pass endures, of course, thanks to all the choice. But the value of individual titles may decline, overall, as will their respective useful lifespans.

This reminds me of what we see on Netflix these days. After years of raising the bar for episodic story telling and spending big money to attract Hollywood stars who had previously appeared only in movies, Netflix has expanded so much the service has suffered. It’s harder to find quality content in part because there’s less of it, and subscribers have to surf through a sea of too many choices, most middling.

Netflix is an excellent example of enshittification. But is this happening to Halo too?

It’s worth debating, but we don’t have enough information yet. Jarrard and the others in the 343 live stream put a positive spin on this new direction, which is understandable and predictable. But what they deliver going forward, with Halo Infinite and future Halo content, will tell the tale. All we can do now is wait and wonder.