Player Driven
Nobody was on the hook for fourteen years of Halo
A game takes four to five years to build. A vesting schedule takes four to five years to finish. So the people who greenlit it have been paid and moved on before anyone finds out whether it worked. Colan Neese said that about forty minutes into this episode and it reframed the whole hour. Microsoft moved Halo to Activision, cut 268 more roles and set five studios loose. Bungie started giving back the Destiny content it deleted six years ago. A game from 1996 made sixty million dollars at the box office. Underneath all three is the same question nobody in the industry likes asking out loud: when the person who decides is never in the room for the outcome, who is actually on the hook? Greg Posner is joined by Colan Neese of ScreenEngine ASI, Simon Pulman of Pryor Cashman and Justin Ruiss of BWG Global. IN THIS EPISODE - Why fourteen years and four declining Halo games produced no consequence - The opportunity cost problem: why Activision will always make another Call of Duty map instead of reviving Spyro - Whether Halo's DNA was ever the campaign, and why the remake shipped without multiplayer - Simon on the five divested studios: "imagine Adidas buys a t-shirt company" - What a private equity buyer would actually own if they bought one - Why subscription funding divorces a studio from cause and effect - The engineering reason Bungie vaulted Destiny content in the first place - The rule nobody states about video game adaptations, and why Resident Evil worked where a Dead Space film would not A correction we made after recording: Ninja Theory was not sold. Microsoft could not find a buyer, two deals fell through, and a proposed closure was confirmed the same day we recorded. Never Entertained is live every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. Read the full write-up: https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-nobody-is-on-the-hook The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io/newsletter Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy Colan Neese writes Patch Notes: https://patchnotesgaming.substack.com/
