Halo Studios’ Future Looks Unclear After Major Layoffs
It’s been a few days since Xbox announced sweeping layoffs, cut 268 Jobs, merged multiple companies, and handed Activision the keys to a future Halo game. In the wake of Halo Studio, a lot of new information has come to light about what was going on during the last couple of years and where the company stands right now.
No Direction, No Leader
Today, Rebs Gaming put out another video after multiple sources began reporting a bunch of details after they were sadly let go. Some of the information has yet to reach the public eye, but we can take away a few key points from the situation so far.
First, according to Rebs and his sources, Halo Studios apparently had no projects in the works outside of the Campaign Remake. Multiple ideas were still in the planning stage, including Halo 2 & 3 remakes, which the community likely knew were coming. Halo 7, and even a spinoff based on the Halo novel, First Strike. This game would have bridged the gap between the CE remake and the eventual Halo 2 remake.
The plan for the spin-off game was to include only 5 campaign missions, a firefight mode, and ship it out next year. In addition, last week before the layoffs, a handful of employees presented a concept update for Halo 7 to Matt Booty and other Xbox executives. In the concept, Halo 7 was to include a campaign, PvP, PvE, and Forge modes on day one of release.
Rogue Installation
After the layoffs, according to Rebs, only 30 employees remain at Halo Studios, including Pierre Hintze, who is still in charge, along with a mixture of artists, designers, engineers, and support workers. Many of the remaining few are from Pierre’s inner circle, and he still wants to find a way to deliver smaller Halo projects. This means continuing to outsource development for remakes like CE, and he wants to use AI to make those smaller projects. Both of which have proven to be the opposite of what the community wants.
In addition, a few developers argued between their experiences on Reddit, so it’s clear we’ll get a bigger picture soon.
A Halo Infinite campaign developer argued with former Forge lead designer Michael Schorr about his work on Forge without even realizing he was replying to Michael. This person then revealed Infinite was going to have hologram scenes of important events that players would mainly… pic.twitter.com/J4PfZpdnIz
— Rebs Gaming (@Mr_Rebs_) September 23, 2026