Halo moving to a multi-platform games engine could mean the franchise jumps over to PlayStation for the first time ever.
Halo is changing in a big way. 343 Industries has renamed the group to Halo Studios, and the franchise is now being developed in Unreal Engine 5. Now that the studio is no longer saddled with the development and upkeep of a proprietary games engine for its new games, Halo Studios can accelerate its production pipeline--and indeed that's what they plan to do.
There are now multiple new Halo games in development, and the leap to Unreal Engine 5 frees Halo Studios from the shackles of the archaic Slipspace engine. According to studio head Pierre Hintze, it's a shift-change for the team: "What we're doing right now is changing our recipe."
Since Unreal Engine 5 is a multi-platform engine through-and-through, it's possible that Halo could be optimized to launch on PlayStation hardware. Microsoft has broken first-party exclusivity in some of its games, and its biggest game (well, before it bought Call of Duty-maker Activision), Minecraft, has always been bigger on PlayStation than it ever was on Xbox (Minecraft is even bigger on Switch).
But more and more first-party Xbox games are breaking exclusivity to ensure a wider salesbase for these expensive games.
The latest, Bethesda's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, is coming to PlayStation 5 just months after launching first on Xbox platforms. "We think this is an interesting point in time for us to use some of what the other platforms have right now to help grow our franchises, so we're going to do that," Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer said earlier this year.
So...what about Halo?
The $6 billion Halo franchise could also make the jump over to PlayStation for both maximized sales revenues and microtransaction earnings via multiplayer skins, and Unreal Engine 5 could be the avenue that allows it to happen at a quicker pace.
Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter also thinks so, telling Eurogamer:
"From a multi-platform game development perspective, moving to Unreal Engine 5 would certainly be easier for the developer than porting across the existing Slipspace engine. It stands to reason that an engine designed for deployment across multiple platforms would be easier to work with than existing technology built for Xbox and PC."
Neither Microsoft nor Halo Studios have confirmed or denied that Halo will move over to PlayStation. But given the stakes involved here--Xbox's games division is now stressed heavily to deliver specific revenue and earnings targets by Microsoft's board of directors, as per the $70 billion Activision Blizzard buyout--it isn't really such a strange concept after all.