Activision, Not Halo Studios, Will Make the Next Halo Game
Microsoft is handing the next mainline Halo game to Call of Duty publisher Activision as Halo Studios shrinks to a fraction of its former size.
Microsoft has decided that the studio built to steward Halo is no longer the studio making the next Halo. Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty confirmed that the next mainline entry in the series is going to Activision, which is standing up what it calls a new purpose-built team separate from its Call of Duty operation, according to Eurogamer. Halo Studios, the outfit formerly known as 343 Industries, is being reduced in size as part of the same restructuring, which is a polite way of saying the people who built this franchise for two decades are being told someone else will finish the next chapter.
The Hollywood Reporter, cited by GameSpot, described the project as a full-feature, mainline installment rather than a spin-off, which follows a series whose last numbered entry, Halo Infinite, landed in 2021 to a reception nobody at Microsoft would call a triumph. Activision boss Rob Kostich told Game File the studio wants to make the greatest Halo game ever, one worthy of the universe and its legacy. It is the kind of line every acquiring studio says about every franchise it inherits, and the value of the sentence has nothing to do with whether anyone believes it. What it tells you is where the confidence sits: not with the team that spent years learning this universe, but with the publisher whose live-service machinery already runs Call of Duty at a scale Halo has never approached. Handing the series to that machinery is not a creative decision. It is a bet on distribution.
AngryJoeShow's reaction video framed the same news as Halo Studios effectively dying, more restructuring layered on restructuring, and the channel's read lines up with what Eurogamer and GameSpot both describe: a studio hollowed out while its flagship property moves to the team next door with the bigger budget line. This site has already covered the reshuffle that pushed Halo's future to Activision while Obsidian folds into Bethesda and the case of a Halo director promoted, then fired a day later, and none of that reads like a coincidence sitting next to this one.
No one at Microsoft has said how many roles at Halo Studios survive the transition, only that the studio is smaller now than it was before this announcement. The people who spent years keeping this universe alive are the ones left waiting to hear if there is still a job attached to the franchise they built.