A former developer commented on the MMORPG related to Halo, which was halted in development by Microsoft. He also expresses strong criticism.
Who is it about? Sandy Petersen was a level designer for Doom and Quake before joining Ensemble Studios. Ensemble Studios is the studio behind Age of Empires I-III, which also created Halo Wars.
Petersen has now spoken in a new post on X.com about the demise of Ensemble Studios and also explains why a gigantic MMORPG died with it.
You can see more about failed MMORPGs here:
Anger about Microsoft
What would the MMORPG have looked like? According to the former developer, the team in 2008 was working on a “gigantic MMO” in the Halo universe. Under the code name “Titan,” it was supposed to take place thousands of years before Halo and include various planets, species, and the universe like today’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.
The MMORPG would have been further along in development, Petersen believes. The home worlds for all species and the quest lines of the game were already functional. However, according to him, that did not protect the MMORPG from cancellation.
Why did the MMORPG fail? Despite his estimate of revenues of 1.1 billion USD (about 945 million EUR) in 2008, the MMORPG was never released (via X.com). Sandy Petersen attributes the reason to the former head of the Xbox brand, Don Mattrick.
According to Petersen, Mattrick was only focused on his stock bonus, which was based on the income of the coming three years. But the developers at Ensemble had estimated the development time until completion to be 3.5 years – 6 months too late for the bonus.
According to Petersen, the studio was closed to save the costs incurred in developing the Halo MMORPG. For Petersen, this is incomprehensible. He states that Ensemble Studios never sold less than 3 million copies per title.
The allegations from Sandy Petersen seem serious, and it is unclear whether and how much of it is really true. The end of the 2000s was also the time of the financial crisis in the USA, during which Microsoft also had to struggle. Whether the personal stock bonus of one person really decided the fate of the MMORPG remains questionable. Another MMORPG is also on the verge of cancellation for financial reasons: Former WoW lead has to seek new investors for his own MMORPG, making him quite “salty”
