The next Halo game will be made by Activision.

Activision to create the next mainline game in the Halo franchise, what does this mean?

Yes, read the headline again. I typed it and still had to double-take. Activision is making the next Halo game. I can only imagine the torrent of mixed reactions welling up as this news spreads. I’ve linked a video from Aztecross which covers some of the detail, although naturally there’s plenty of speculation mixed in too.

As part of Xbox’s latest restructuring, Activision has been handed development of the next Halo title through what Xbox describes as a new, purpose-built team...

The confirmed part is already wild enough. As part of Xbox’s latest restructuring, Activision has been handed development of the next Halo title through what Xbox describes as a new, purpose-built team, separate from the teams currently making Call of Duty. A smaller group at Halo Studios will remain in place to support the existing games and Halo community. The announcement also arrived alongside another 268 job cuts across Halo Studios, other Xbox first-party studios and central management. My initial reaction? I rolled my eyes. Not because Activision is incapable of making a great shooter — that would be ridiculous — but because the first place my mind went was the Call of Duty machine and the prospect of Halo eventually being fed into something similar. To be clear, Xbox has not announced a yearly Halo release schedule. But you can understand why people might worry about it. Call of Duty has operated at a scale almost nothing else in gaming can match. By 2024, Activision said the franchise had sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. Microsoft itself paid $68.7 billion for Activision Blizzard in one of the biggest acquisitions the games industry has ever seen. That is an enormous machine to suddenly have sitting behind Halo. And Halo is hardly some small property being rescued from obscurity either. By late 2021, the series had already sold more than 81 million games, before Halo Infinite was even included in that total. The question has never really been about Halo's relevance. It’s whether modern Xbox has known what to do with it. Bungie established the language of Halo across Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, ODST and finally Reach. When 343 Industries took over, we entered what Halo Studios itself would later describe as the franchise’s “second chapter”. In 2024, 343 became Halo Studios, moved development to Unreal Engine 5 and publicly described the transition as the beginning of another new era. And now, barely two years into that identity, we are apparently entering another one. For me, the post-Bungie output has largely been mid — but the good kind of mid you can tolerate. There have absolutely been moments where Halo still clicks. I quite enjoyed my Legendary playthrough of Halo Infinite. Mechanically, there are moments where it feels fantastic. The weapons, movement and combat sandbox can still remind you exactly why this series became such a phenomenon in the first place. But something changed when Bungie left. The sense of scale. The mystery. The spectacle. The feeling that you were participating in some enormous military science-fiction epic rather than simply playing another entry in a franchise. That is harder to quantify than frame rates, weapon balance or multiplayer playlists, but I think longtime Halo players know exactly what I mean.

So negativity aside, lets throw in a dash of optimism.

Because this could also be an extraordinary opportunity. Activision brings access to one of the deepest pools of first-person-shooter production experience anywhere in the industry. Call of Duty has survived for more than two decades by coordinating multiple studios, enormous technical pipelines, online infrastructure and some frankly absurd production budgets. And crucially, Xbox isn't simply dropping Halo into an existing Call of Duty studio. Its announcement specifically says the next game will be made by a new team built for Halo, separate from ongoing Call of Duty development. That is the tiny spark that could mean Halo actually gets the love, time and effort it deserves. If Microsoft and Activision can resist the temptation to simply make Call of Duty in Mjolnir armour, listen to what Halo players actually love about the franchise, recruit the right creative leadership and combine that with Activision's production muscle, then there is absolutely a path where this becomes something special. Maybe Halo needs an outside perspective. Maybe twenty-five years after Combat Evolved, reinvention is exactly what the series needs. The ingredients are certainly there: one of gaming's most recognisable universes, decades of lore, a huge existing audience and now the resources of one of the biggest publishing organisations gaming has ever seen. But resources have never automatically produced great art. The question is what they choose to do with them. There is a version of this future where Halo becomes another content pipeline. There is another where somebody finally looks at this universe, understands why those first games felt so enormous, and says: Let's make Halo feel impossible again. It is going to be a long road to get there. But for the first time in quite a while, I genuinely don't know what the next Halo is going to look like. And that, at least, is interesting. What do you think? The Panel is open. Share your doubts, your hopes, and what you think Activision absolutely must — or must not — change about Halo.