343 Industries is chasing a broader, more casual audience for its Halo franchise. How will this impact long-time fans?

Halo is chasing a broader audience. Halo fans have seen this before in other franchises and many of them are worried about the fate of their beloved franchise. Alarm bells are certainly ringing.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this

In the last couple of days we have seen coverage of a report in the Washington post where Bonnie Ross discussed the desire at 343 / Microsoft to push Halo to a broader audience.

I think it’s a huge opportunity for us being able to go off console and think about a broader audience

Bonnie Ross speaking to the Washington Post

It’s clear from the article that the decision to go free to play / live service and the development of the TV show are attempts to broaden the appeal of Halo.

And I think both with the Halo TV series bringing in a broader audience, with free to play bringing in a broader audience, and then for us, I think it really is learning about how to be an ongoing service and having an ongoing dialogue with fans and getting the infrastructure right.”

Bonnie Ross speaking to the Washington Post

The phrase broader audience is littered throughout the piece and perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise. Microsoft are a business like any other and it is incumbent upon them to try and reach as large an audience as possible. The fear for long time Halo players is that these efforts will come at their expense. That development of long-time features such as Co-Op campaign play and forge mode will be side-lined in favour of newer, more lucrative game modes with more avenues for monetisation. A Battle Royale mode is rumoured to be in development by Certain Affinity and this will no doubt coincide with the release of hundreds of more cosmetic items available to purchase.

A plea to 343 from a Halo fan

The soft reboot nature of the campaign story and the failure to include fan favourite modes like Co-Op and Forge can now be put into context. What it has become clear that Halo Infinite was shipped in an incomplete state because these features were not “required” to ship the game. Adding these features didn’t aid the goal of attracting a broader audience and were seen as expendable in an effort to chase that audience. So far, that broader audience hasn’t materialised as player numbers from Steam show us.

My appeal to 343 is do not forget your base. Don’t leave behind the very fans who got you where you are today chasing a broader audience with no affinity or loyalty to your franchise.

Take your core audience with you.

Don’t compromise the core gameplay in a desperate attempt to engage new players. They will come on their own if you publish a quality product. Never mess with “THE DANCE” in an effort to engage new players. You will fail and only succeed in ruining what makes Halo Halo and alienating the fans you have left.

Learn the lessons from other franchises on how to handle audience expectations. Don’t ever try to subvert them in place genuine creativity and experimentation. (I’m looking at you Star Wars)

Respect the history and the time your core audience has invested.

Respect the amount of money they have invested over the years.

Respect the fact that they are your biggest cheerleaders and will build hype and momentum for you. They will create the clips, the memes, the commentary and yes the criticism necessary to carry the franchise forward.

Talk to the fans, engage with the fans. Be honest with your fans. We are not fooled by lengthy blog posts which say not much of anything and provide no insight to the vision for the game and no sight of a clear way forward. Talk of ten year plans and platforms for the future is cheap when the present is in such a precarious state.

Franchises without their die-hard fans are nothing. They are a faded sticker on a lunch box, a torn poster on a bedroom wall, a forgotten toy, a game no one plays, a caricature of their former glory with all the trappings of success and none of true value of their former selves.

It is true that franchises need to grow, to change, to evolve or they will die out. But change without creativity or originality leads to stagnation and eventually death. In the case of Halo this will be a slow, drawn-out death as players hang on to former glories in the hopes that someone will save them and the stories they love.

I said this in a previous video……….”what will you do when Halos biggest content creators move on to something else”. In the past few weeks, we have seen a sizeable chunk of the content creator community “move on” to other games because they cannot see a way forward covering this franchise.

This is a symptom of the problem rather than the cause, but cause and effect are ever present. Halo could enter a death spiral where a lack of in game content drives creators away, a lack of content online further suppresses interest and so on until the effort required to get the fans back on side becomes exponentially harder. Your core audience deserts you as the casual players move on to something else if they were ever there at all.

343 the community wants you to succeed and will be ready to pick up the baton when the time comes. Build on your core fans and the features they love, and this game and your franchise will be in good health for years to come.