Today's Xbox changes may bring Halo sooner, but history shows assembly-line development often makes dull games

When I was a kid, I adored Chewits. Every one of those chewy sugar bricks came close to pulling a tooth out, but the sharp hit of strawberry, blackcurrant, and orange was impossible to turn down. Left alone with a bag of them, I would strip off all the wrappers and squash the sweets together in my palm until they formed one giant Chewit boulder. The colors and flavors blurred into one, but the sheer mass and density of it appealed to the little glutton in me. The first time I tried it, I shoved the whole lump into my mouth — and when I bit down, my jaw practically fused shut in the sticky mess. In a panic I tried to swallow, nearly choked as the shapeless blob slid into my throat, and only coughed it back up before things got truly dangerous.

I'd love to claim that happened just once, but it took three or four attempts before I understood that mashing things together, however obvious it seems that it should multiply their amazingness, can actually produce a formless mass that will choke you.

Which brings us to Xbox's plans to consolidate its studios.

The Synergies Argument, and Why It Doesn't Hold

There will be sensible, business-minded people stroking their beards at Xbox's announcement, noting that studios like Bethesda and Obsidian share plenty of synergies. Obsidian has already worked on some of Bethesda's best-known properties, and the Fallout: New Vegas developers are busy on a new Fallout game right now. Rare's biggest hit, Sea of Thieves, is a live service game, and Activision Blizzard has run online live service titles — World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo — for decades. And Activision has essentially perfected shipping a Call of Duty on time every single year, something nobody says about 343 Industries and Halo.

They may have a point. But I have two responses: first, is Xbox actually capable of making that work? And second, even if it did, wouldn't that make for a tremendously boring future?

On the first point, Xbox has done very little to show it knows what to do with the studios it already owns. Rare's Everwild, The Initiative's Perfect Dark, and Undead Labs' State of Decay 3 all spent years in pre-production before being cancelled or shelved. Mojang and Activision Blizzard, meanwhile, simply carried on as before, with nothing added by their new owners. Or worse: a studio ships a great game, everyone agrees it's exactly the kind of thing Xbox wishes it made more of, and the studio gets closed anyway.

Xbox's own leadership has admitted the rot. Back in July, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote that "in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested." This is not a company with a track record of knowing what it's doing. Another example: last year 343 Industries was renamed Halo Studios, and this year the series is being moved to Activision along with 268 members of the team.

I don't want to dwell on the business side too much, though. Playing fantasy football with game studios is a fun mental exercise — a Gears of War from Obsidian, a Halo by Rare, a Minesweeper from Treyarch — but when those conversations are triggered by closures and layoffs, it quickly erases the human cost of a corporation shrugging its shoulders.

Doubling Down on Big Series

What interests me more is what consolidation means for these studios and their games. In June, Sharma said Xbox had "found ourselves overextended," owning "industry-defining franchises" that it had "not adequately funded them to compete and win." Paired with this week's announcements, that essentially confirms what's been suspected for a while: Xbox is going all-in on its biggest series and pushing to release more of them, faster.

Whether that actually means a new Fallout and a new Halo every year, Call of Duty-style, remains to be seen. But what it means for creativity and quality is far easier to predict. Decades of evidence show that when publishers chase annual releases, the quirks of individual studios get worn down or erased, innovation flattens out, and series sink ever deeper into their own lore-holes.

Consider Assassin's Creed. After the second game launched, Ubisoft shifted to annual releases and held that pace for seven years. One studio technically led each entry, but in practice dozens of teams and hundreds of staff worldwide worked on them. Over that stretch, the series drifted from its social stealth roots into a generic open-world template. Ubisoft's central editorial team, meant to spread lessons across projects, instead meant nearly every game shipped with lookout towers, crafting, and a battle pass. When speed is the goal, you stop asking whether there's a better way to do something — you just use what works and move on. It's how Ubisoft ended up making Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Only when players burned out on samey, increasingly buggy releases and stopped buying them did Ubisoft drop the annual cycle — which finally gave teams room for radical reinventions like Assassin's Creed Origins, and later the tighter, more focused Assassin's Creed Mirage.

Developers keep saying the same thing. In a December briefing, Elder Scrolls Online game director Nick Giaomini complained that annual expansions for the MMO had "become predictable and too formulaic." The problem, he said, was that "It took 18 months to do. It was all hands on deck to support. That lead time just didn't really leave much room to react to player feedback or address long standing issues." (Naturally, Xbox then fired more than a hundred staff from that team.)

Piecing Together Games by Committee

Over the past year, Xbox has repeatedly cut away the parts of itself that were distinct — Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Arkane were all sold off or carved into independent units. The most destructive element of this consolidation, I think, is that releasing games more frequently forces development to be split across many studios, each handling constituent parts. Yes, Activision ships a new Call of Duty every year, and has done so with more consistency than Ubisoft ever managed, but each game is a strange picnic basket of singleplayer campaigns and multiplayer modes from different teams, with almost no attempt at a cohesive whole.

Other publishers aim for something slightly more unified, and still end up with games stripped of their makers' identities. Over at EA, the Burnout veterans at Criterion are now simply one of many studios making Battlefield games. Despite years of driving-game expertise, their contribution so far has been the vehicles in the singleplayer campaign — and played in isolation, you'd struggle to spot their hand or distinguish their work from anyone else's.

So when Xbox pulls more studios under Activision's umbrella, adds Obsidian to Bethesda's roster, and merges Playground with Turn 10, it may believe it's unlocking portfolio synergies and setting up great growth momentum next quarter. I just see a ball of mashed-up Chewits. Nothing about squeezing these teams together suggests it will multiply their games' amazingness.

You might argue that running a corporation is different from a greedy child stuffing their face with sweets. I'd disagree.

Source: the original publisher