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 issue...