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Don't worry, one comes along every 5 minutes
Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net>	Date: 5/26/06 10:18 a.m.
In Response To: Re: IMO: somebody missed the boat *really LONG* (gspawn) : It's weird that I'm going to say this when Narcogen is involved, but it seems : like this article is totally, completely off base. Like not even in the : ballpark where the bases are... here's why: [And yes, this is all going : from my interpretation of how things went down, using mostly Bungie's own : words instead of a third party's reporting. My interpretation could be : wrong, so I'll throw the salt shaker out the window ahead of time.] The article is a summary of Dean Takahashi's book as it relates to Bungie and Halo. I've added a few rhetorical questions and some commentary into the article, but mostly it's quotes from the book, and I've cited page numbers. You may well say that Takahashi is off base-- Frankie seems to suggest as much by saying they found parts of the book "surprising". : -Halo 2 was the final game from the beginning. And yes, that was obvious from : the beginning (wasn't it even in the FAQ for a while?). Bungie said they : planned on wrapping everything up there, and on the H2SpecialEd DVD, you : can see confirmation. Halo 3 only came to exist when Bungie couldn't make : their own deadline (because we see confirmation they had the clout to : truly make their own deadline here, even in the article). What Bungie intends and what Microsoft intends may be two different things. I find it believable that there would be those at Microsoft who could not possibly see the logic of dropping a hot property like Halo just because the developers wanted to do something different. I also have little trouble believing that J Allard wanted a Bungie/Halo launch title for the 360. Since Halo 2 was already in development at that time as an Xbox title, this would have to have been a Halo 3. If I had to guess I think the call to not delay Halo 2 and make it a completed game as an Xbox 360 launch title came down to the idea that three titles means more units sold than two, even if not all the individual titles are as successful as each other. : [btw: The "3 levels" thing often gets a lot of hubbub- Bungie : talked about the cut on the DVD and called it a "final chapter" : or so, and given their earlier statement that Halo 2 would conclude the : series mismatched with the game's ending, the announcement wasn't too : necessary... if they thought Halo 3 could be turned into a full game, is 3 : levels really that dramatic?] I ask that very question in the article. Takahashi's book is not clear on this point, and to date Bungie has not clarified. : --This puts the entire first half of the article into the land of : meaninglessness, as the struggle over "what would happen to Halo : 3" didn't actually exist at the time. Sure, Microsoft would want a : sequel- who doesn't like money? But Bungie wasn't making one. And when : Bungie chose to counter that, it was an entirely internal decision based : on their own release and their own expectations for the series. I think the question the article asks is whether or not it is really practical to say that Bungie and Microsoft have equal say in what goes on-- let alone that Bungie has autonomy. If MS wants Halo 3 or 4 and insists on it, probably the only thing everyone at Bungie can do is quit-- and the book says that threat was made. Microsoft obviously doesn't want that. But perhaps they would turn the franchise over to someone else. Perhaps they have that right, unless the buyout language prohibits it. : --The REAL battle for 'Halo 3' at the time seems like it was just trilogy : syndrome. Microsoft had a massive hit, so the natural expectation was for : the cash cow to crank out a trilogy (Allard's expectation was based on : this, not any actual relation the 'game' Halo 3- he just expected the : 'idea' of Halo 3 to become reality, or that's my immediate : interpretation). This is certainly how it's done in Hollywood. And you : can't blame Microsoft for wanting that- Bungie and Halo made the Xbox. If : they could finish the Xbox and start the 360, they'd have built : Microsoft's future for them. I'd want that too. I would have believed that, but it seems as if this battle was never fought. Bungie went right to work on Halo 3 after shipping Halo 2, as they said at E3. In fact, if Takahashi can be believed on this point, Jones tried to keep Halo at a two-game series with his offer to delay and make a 360 launch title. Allard's mention of Halo 3 prior to that either means that he wanted a Halo 3 before it ever became a necessity, regardless of what Bungie did or didn't want to do, OR that even with Halo 2 shipping in late 2004 he wanted Bungie to some how crank out a sequel or expansion or something for the 360 launch, which also clearly didn't happen. There are several different theories about what happened within the book, and they do not all reconcile with each other, but that doesn't mean that one of them isn't right. : -Microsoft's decision to push Halo made the Xbox, and made Bungie the : publicly adored genius stepchild that it is today. Don't get me wrong, : they'd still be brilliant developers with a massive following, but they : probably wouldn't be getting regular front-page trips to the Wall Street : Journal, either. I'm talking about the scale of the success, not the : quality. Pushing Halo was a brilliant move, and should an Xbox console : someday "win" the console wars, the Halo move will have : basically been the cornerstone of the whole battle. It was this move that : made Xbox, set up the console early on, and made all of Microsoft's : efforts after that possible- er, at least as fast and easy as it went : down. (Who in their right mind thought Microsoft would top Nintendo in : only one generation?) Nintendo's decline in unit sales per generation goes back further than Microsoft's entry into the market. They may be accelerating Nintendo's demise, but they did not cause it. Fans will, no doubt, point out Nintendo's (usually) reliable profitability and stack it up against the massive hardware subsidies that Sony and MS run up trying to be ambitious with each new console. However, regardless of how much profit you make on each box, you make none if you don't sell any, and if the trends continue as they are at some point in the future Nintendo will face that problem. There is certainly a limit at which economies of scale will begin to work against them. : --The best move for Microsoft was to have Halo at launch. The best move for : Bungie, and the entire console, was Halo at launch. There wasn't any other : option, if Xbox was going to be a big success. And knowing the ruthless : businesspeople at Microsoft, I can't help but think this was known and : planned for. Both Bungie and Microsoft made out like bandits from this : move, so it's hard to find any negatives here. It's been suggested that nobody but Fries really knew what Microsoft had with Bungie. Certainly, if the book is right, they didn't have to pay top dollar for them. The cited purchase price for Bungie, for instance, is around 10% of what MS just paid for Lionhead. That Halo was the smash hit for the original Xbox I think was better anticipated by old Bungie fans and the gaming press than it was by Microsoft. : --If the decision to push Halo was one of the smartest moves in console : history, you gotta imagine people knew what they were doing when it came : to sequels. The immediate, smartest business move was "where's my : trilogy?" just like Hollywood does. And Bungie had pushed out 2 : trilogies before (er, does Myth really count?), so Microsoft saw Bungie : had more than enough potential and skill to pull off a trilogy in grand : fashion. I would have been all over them for it, too, and I couldn't fault : Allard for thinking similarly. Nor would I; and I think he planned it much earlier than the rescheduling of Halo 2. I think it's possible he also wanted Halo 2 early enough to make Halo 3 a launch title-- even if Bungie didn't intend to make Halo 3 at the time! On the details: Bungie neither developed nor published Myth 3, as the property was sold to Take Two as part of the buyout. Bungie published but didn't develop Marathon Infinity; a group of ex-Bungie guys formed a company called Double Aught and did that. : the profit generated by Halo 2 might have been the difference between : forging ahead and throwing in the towel. : -Dead wrong. Microsoft is in this console race to push Sony out of the home : market, not to sell consoles. It's an institutional investment with : hazards, and Microsoft is willing to foot the bill. You'll see in other : interviews that Microsoft didn't really ever care if Xbox turned a profit- : the whole first gen venture was understood to be an investment in the home : market. Turning a profit was a great bonus, not anything necessary. I cannot agree with you there. There is every indication that Halo 2 only exists as an Xbox game in order to put a profitable quarter in the books for the Entertainment division; otherwise they could have retooled as a 360 launch title, finished the story, and moved on to something else. If MS really wanted ONLY to compete in the living room with sony, then the Xbox would have an HD-DVD in it. That is a long-term strategy, not a short-term one, though. MS cannot indefinitely afford to throw money at the Xbox without getting anything back for it. They cannot simply pound Sony into submission. And Microsoft's other divisions, which foot the bill for projects like the Xbox, are seeing the first hints of trouble in years-- Microsoft's stock has had a dip for the first time in recent memory. Don't believe MS doesn't care about profit in this case. It's not the only thing, and it's not a near-term thing, but it is in the plans. Especially when it comes to individual managers, who as you might imagine may well have incentives in their compensation tied to sales and profitability targets. : -The part of the article detailing the "committee vote" to push : Halo 2 out the door full of resentment from all sides seems worrying. But : with all of the overdramatization and oddness above, I'm thinking back to : the salt that flew over my shoulder. Was it REALLY that bad? See the above : note- Halo2's profit didn't mean nearly as much to the Xbox as Takashi : claimed... and in fact, having Halo 2 as a 360 title would have been a : MUCH bigger win for Microsoft. How so? There's every indication that Halo 3 will sell as well as Halo 2 did. Halo 2 sold pretty well. You can make twice the money if you sell twice the titles. That doesn't mesh with the idea to delay H2 into a launch title. Basically, MS wanted Bungie to do a game every 2 years. Bungie can only manage these days to make a game every 3 years. That's what it boils down to, plain and simple. The question of what games those will be is separate-- but once Phoenix was cancelled, it seems Halo was the only thing left on the front burner. Whatever other ideas are out there, we haven't seen them yet. And with 360 already launching, Microsoft : could have taken a loss on Xbox for a profit on 360 and broken even : financially, so talking about profits here makes no sense. These things are tracked by quarters. No profit would have come from Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 for another year. It would be less profit, since out of that you'd have to pay Bungie's salaries for another 12 months for the same sales revenues. Takahashi says that Halo 2 cost 30 to 40 million to make. For the sake of argument, let's say it was 30. Three years, 30 million, so ten million a year. Let's grossly oversimplify that and say it costs 10 million a year to keep Bungie working-- not just salaries, but everything attached to making a game. If you work six years and produce two titles, that's sixty million dollars against the revenues of those two titles-- for sake of argument, let's say $100 million. So you make $200 million and subtract $60m for a gross profit of $140M. But if you work six years and produce THREE titles, your costs are roughly similar but your revenue is now $600M, for a gross profit of $460M-- more than three times as much! This is, of course, a very gross approximation-- and a lot of costs are one-time and promotional, and therefore unaffected by how long Bungie works to make the game. But I think the point still stands-- three games in six years makes more money than two games in six years. The Microsoft Games division-- and by this I mean Xbox and 360, as they are not financially separate in any meaningful way-- has only had one profitable quarter, the quarter in which Halo 2 shipped. It will most likely not get another one until Halo 3 ships-- 18 months away, I guess. That's two profitable quarters in seven years. If Bungie had shipped Halo 2 in 2003, shipped Halo 3 (or another title) in 2005, and was now readying a third title (Halo or not) for 2007-- publishing once every two years-- MS would have had three profitable quarters in seven years. Given the huge take of Halo 2, I think it is an inescapable conclusion that Microsoft would have preferred this scenario if at all possible. Takahashi's book suggests that this is exactly what Allard wanted, and it was Fries who said that to do so would ruin the franchise and thus make those profits impossible to get. Also, lots of : Bungie staffers did leave at this time, but we know a lot of them already : had expiring contracts or (like Seropian) already had a urge to do : something else anyway. It was a season of change for a lot of people, even : without any Halo 2 debacles. This makes it hard to take Takashi too : seriously on the committee section... was he overdramatizing again? I don't think Takahashi ever suggested Seropian's departure was related to this. He does suggest that Hamilton Chu's was and that Ed Fries' departure from MS was. : -Takashi's final claim also throws me off. He says Halo 3 will only be good : if Microsoft gives Bungie room... but it seems the included passages make : Halo 2 seem like a success despite Microsoft, and I assume he'd agree : that Halo's success (or at least its importance to Xbox) was because of : Microsoft. He's obviously overdramatizing here. So again, I'm having : trouble taking him seriously elsewhere. Yes, it is-- because that is what J Allard and Peter Moore have said. They consider Halo 2 a success story of what happens when you give a studio creative freedom, and they mean it without sarcasm or irony. What Takahashi is saying is that if were not for Ed Fries, Bungie would not have had that freedom-- and that even so, they didn't have as much freedom as they might have liked. As for what fans think, I do know there are some who consider Halo 2 the opposite-- as an example of what happens when a studio has its creative style cramped by deadlines and bean-counters. Whether the game can possibly be both I don't know if I can rightly answer. Whether it can be the latter while simultaneously being a smash financial success is also difficult to answer. I'm perhaps convinced enough in the high standards that Bungie sets for itself, as well as the high expectations that its fans have, that as good as Halo 2 could have been it might still have been better-- or at least more polished and complete. What Bungie would do after is anyone's guess. Now that guess will just come later down the line. : Diaclaimer: Yes, this is based on my own knowledge of events. And no, I : haven't read the rest of the book, so maybe things are a bit out of : context. And I'm not saying Takashi or Narc don't know what they're : talking about. But I've seen big figures mess up regarding Bungie in the : past (see: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Halo 3 "announcements"). : Forgive me, all. Just to mention again: just about everything in there is a quotation or paraphrase of Takahashi's text. : Finally: What comes next? : Bungie. Delicious Bungie. (heh) : And if Bungie staffers really are burning out, they have only to mention it : to the fans and scores of letters (re: death threats) will pour into : Microsoft on their behalf. We're ready and willing to assist. : Don't make us kick your ass! (again, heh) If the claims of burnout are based solely on the departure of Fries and Chu, then I think it's fair to perhaps characterize them as overdramatized. What I can understand, though, would be not burnout of the people, but of the franchise. Bungie will have been working on Halo for nearly nine years by the time Halo 3 ships if my guess is right. That's a long time. I might never get sick of playing it, but I wouldn't blame them for getting sick of making it. Not everybody is-- or wants to be-- George Lucas.

Halo 3 Articles

Message Index

bungie burnout	visibledetritus	5/25/06 7:30 p.m.
Re: bungie burnout	Frankie	5/25/06 7:47 p.m.
Re: bungie burnout	UrsusArctos	5/25/06 8:08 p.m.
Hogan's Heroes...	Pratch™	5/25/06 8:20 p.m.
Allard was right, Fries was wrong.	JakeDaGreat	5/25/06 8:53 p.m.
Re: Allard was right, Fries was wrong.	visibledetritus	5/25/06 8:57 p.m.
Re: Allard was right, Fries was wrong.	MSN	5/25/06 9:25 p.m.
Re: Allard was right, Fries was wrong.	visibledetritus	5/25/06 10:54 p.m.
Real Artists Ship	Narcogen	5/26/06 1:29 a.m.
Re: Real Artists Ship	Count Zero	5/26/06 12:36 p.m.
Not to mention	Pratch™	5/26/06 12:50 p.m.
Re: bungie burnout	Roger Wilco	5/25/06 9:15 p.m.
Re: bungie burnout	Rade	5/25/06 10:31 p.m.
Harsh	Narcogen	5/26/06 1:41 a.m.
Re: bungie burnout	Narcogen	5/26/06 1:35 a.m.
Re: bungie burnout	Roger Wilco	5/26/06 2:32 p.m.
Re: IMO: somebody missed the boat *really LONG*	gspawn	5/26/06 8:08 a.m.
Don't worry, one comes along every 5 minutes	Narcogen	5/26/06 10:18 a.m.
Re: Don't worry, one comes along every 5 minutes	Matt	5/26/06 10:28 a.m.
Re: Don't worry, one comes along every 5 minutes	Narcogen	5/26/06 10:38 a.m.
Re: Don't worry, one comes along every 5 minutes	Matt	5/26/06 11:02 a.m.
Re: Don't worry, one comes along every 5 minutes	Narcogen	5/26/06 12:01 p.m.
Re:The three levels deal	ShortRoundMcfly	5/26/06 12:08 p.m.
Re:The three levels deal	Count Zero	5/26/06 12:42 p.m.
Re:The three levels deal	Narcogen	5/26/06 1:16 p.m.
Re: Don't worry, one comes along every 5 minutes	MSN	5/26/06 10:59 a.m.
LIES!	Pratch™	5/26/06 11:45 a.m.
Refutation	Narcogen	5/26/06 11:54 a.m.
Re: Refutation	MSN	5/26/06 9:06 p.m.
Re: Refutation	Narcogen	5/26/06 9:58 p.m.
Re: Don't worry, one comes along every 5 minutes	Ma1agate	5/26/06 1:00 p.m.
So why not...	Pratch™	5/26/06 1:27 p.m.
Re: So why not...	Ma1agate	5/26/06 2:07 p.m.
By all means	Pratch™	5/26/06 2:29 p.m.
Well...	Pratch™	5/26/06 2:43 p.m.
Re: IMO: somebody missed the boat *really LONG*	Matt	5/26/06 10:22 a.m.
Re: IMO: somebody missed the boat *really LONG*	Narcogen	5/26/06 10:40 a.m.
Re: IMO: somebody missed the boat *really LONG*	Sep7imus [subnova]	5/26/06 12:42 p.m.
Re: IMO: somebody missed the boat *really LONG*	KP	5/26/06 1:23 p.m.
Re: IMO: somebody missed the boat *really LONG*	Louis Wu	5/26/06 1:42 p.m.
Re: IMO: somebody missed the boat *really LONG*	Narcogen	5/26/06 3:22 p.m.
Re: IMO: somebody missed the boat *really LONG*	UrsusArctos	5/26/06 8:33 p.m.
Re: bungie burnout	Twelve Large	5/26/06 10:41 p.m.
Re: bungie burnout	Narcogen	5/27/06 6:55 a.m.