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Microsoft Wants More Frequent Halo Releases
If the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Game Studios has his way, you'll be seeing Halo much more frequently than you're used to. Bungie is known for spending years polishing their core Halo games, but Phil Spencer says that isn't quite enough. Speaking to IGN, he said "There's no explicit strategy that says we're to ship a Halo game every year. I will say I think one Halo game every three years - which was kind of our old cadence - is probably not frequent enough," said Spencer.
Gamers might take that as a sign that Microsoft wants to Activision-ize the franchise by milking its customers, but Spencer says that isn't the case. "I'll just be honest as a gamer. I used to look at annual releases of non-sports games as people trying to milk me. I figured nobody had enough time to do a good job, and all of the negatives that we would associate with those kinds of scenarios. Kudos to Activision because they've done a good job building a good game, continuing to release each year and I think the fans feel like it's a good thing that they do that. I think there are some things to learn, some positives and some opportunities, in what they do with that. Obviously they've kept the quality extremely high which I think is important."
It's comforting to see the company being aware of the consumer fear of being milked with annual installments. Let's just hope this new approach doesn't negatively affect the high quality that the Halo series is known for.
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