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Halo 2 Release Date Slips?
George Bailey writes "Forbes.com/Reuters has posted an interview with Microsoft's Chief Xbox Officer Robbie Bach, who provided some vague hints in regards to the launch of flagship Xbox FPS sequel, Halo 2. In his own words: 'We're going to ship it when it's ready...That might be the first half of 2004, it might not. You have to be careful with franchises like this.' The current projected release date is, or was, April 1st 2004, according to game retailers." Update: 01/11 07:46 GMT by S : Several commenters point out that 'slipped' is in the eye of the beholder: "What I get from Mr. Bach is that they don't have a firm release date at all - hell, they've probably never had one at all - and they're avoiding a firm commitment to consumers on the issue."
And yelled out "April Fools!" to all the people trying to pick it up that day. I'm sure everyone would get a kick out of it.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Last I heard was in this months new Electronic Gaming Monthy, and they'd heard that the release date had been pushed back until late (Christmas period) December of 04. April sounds a little sketchy.
sigs are dumb.
As much as I hate Bungie (well, Alex Seropian and Jason Jones) for selling out, they have always released their software when they were ready. I am assuming that Bungie is still doing Halo, of course ... but with Marathon, they tried releasing it before it was ready (when it was still just Pathways into Darkness II), and it got slammed at MacWorld. I think they learned their lesson. I'm glad to see that some of Bungie's ass-kick-ness is still left.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
While Gamestop and EB both list the tentative release data of April 1st, Amazon lists April 18th as the day the Master Chef returns. Maybe Amazon knows something? Nah... that'll be the day...
MS are going to have this game launch around the same time as Doom III and half-life2 just so people think of it in the same category.
Though I have to admit I tried original Halo on the PC and was terribly disappointed. I think xbox owners are wowed by it cause they don't have much to compare to on that platform. As much as I am pro-PS2, first person shooters belong on a mouse on a PC.
The dates quoted by retailers further than a month in advance are tentative, and they've been so for a long, LONG time (which is part of the reason it's news when a game "goes gold"). I can still recall my "favorite" waiting period back when Microprose kept promising Gunship 2000. The Software, Etc. I frequented at the time had it on the "maybe next month" list for an exceedingly long period of time (at least a year).
Yeah, I heard that was the release date for DNF too. And it's also the day that Infinium's Phantom service goes live. Wow, what a big day for gamers.
That's the same date Duke Nukem Forever is slated for release.
Last year, if you walked into an EB and grabbed their new release binder, you'd find they had release dates for Duke Nukem Forever and Team Fortress 2.
This was around the time when they had a release date of June 6th, 2003 for Halo 2.
After a couple of months passed, the dates for DNF and TF2 were deleted (they had probably sat at June 6th, 2003 for a looong time), and Halo 2 was moved to April 1st, 2004. Fable used to be listed as January 16th, 2004 -- it's not coming out anytime soon, either.
Unfortunately for the gaming public, EB doesn't have any way to signal that they don't have a relatively firm release date for an item. The closest they get is when they have a release date with a 0$ price on it. Anything else could be firm in stone, or entirely hypothetical -- it's just there to generate preorders so thay have an idea of what the demand for the game is going to be, and thus how to ship things. After all, EB's entire profit structure is based around carrying the minimum number of each title in order to maximize the number of different titles they can carry (thus beating the crap out of Wal*Mart for selection).
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I'm sorry, Jason, did I hurt your feelings?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
How were they selling out? Because they made a game for the Xbox and tha went on to sell over 3 million copies in the US alone? Geez... why be a lil troll about it because you are one of those people that think that PC games are actually profitable.
Game developers these days are getting smart, and smart enough to realize that PC gaming is a dead end and the money lies in the consoles. People need to pay bills and support themselves, and that isn't happening merely on PC game sales
Go climb back in your dark, damp cave you troll
Actually, I think it's possible he was referring to the fact that Bungie literally sold out to Microsoft - you know, like, they were for sale and were subsequently purchased?
Maybe you're not familar with the history of Bungie. Let me 'splain it to you.
... which, eventually, was handeled by outsiders. Three years later.
Bungie software was formed in 1991 by Alex Seropian. Late in 1991, Alex hooked up with Jason Jones, who was apparently a Comp Sci major at U Chicago, a classmate of Alex's. Alex convinced Jason to come on board Bungie, and from the mouths of these babes (and a host of others) came Pathways into Darkness, Marathon, Marathon 2:Durandal, and Marathon Infinity. Myth was released in 1997, and Myth II in 1999. Bungie software was making money making games for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms, simultaneously releasing on both platforms.
Apparently, it wasn't enough to make the greatest games. Halo was announced, previewed (by Steve Jobs, no less) at MacWorld, and was going to be a simultaneous release for Macintosh and Windows, as both Myth and Myth II had. That was enough for the Borg Collective's Hive Mind, Bill Gates.
Microsoft enticed Bungie with stories of untold riches, and by all accounts has delivered. The simultaneous release of Halo, announced at MacWorld, became the slave's response of "we were just kidding. We may never deliver Halo for the Mac or the PC"
So, I ask you: how is that not selling out? Bungie Software was making great games (and still is making a great game, by all accounts), and making more money than anyone in Bungie had ever dreamed of. Making enough money to buy themselves new cars, give away computers at trade shows, living what amounts to the pre-IPO/dotcom startup dream. Then, with one whiff of freshly-minted greenbacks, turned their backs on the very customers who had paid all that money for their success.
That, my fellow slashdotter, is how they sold out.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Yes, I am dense. I will shut up when you put your name on your post, you pansy.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
OMGA! They changed the release date, someone call the Anonymous Leaker! lol I kid, I kid.
- shazow
Bungie has always had a release policy of "when it's done, it's done", even back in the old Marthon (original) days. A sideways comment like "may or may not be released ..." is not atypical for Bungie, either. (They have announced suspected release times before then pushed it back, especially with Marathon 2.)
I don't know about the BorgBungie, but pre-X-Box days the Bungie fellows were always pragmatic and forward about this. It looks like their view of taking their time, at least, has not changed.
Cyan (now CyanWorlds) had a similar philosophy with Riven, much to their publisher's ire. I'm sure some other game makers have this attitude, but none are so vocal or public as Bungie.
This now concludes our broadcast day.
Slightly on a Tangent to the Main Topic, but whatever happened to the notion of companies being Agile and Business being a dogfight ? The bottomline is that MS has never been in a hurry. And the point is - do you want to bet money against that paradigm.
Some juicy quotes from Steve Ballmer in April 2003
Tuning could be replaced with extortion and the sentence would probably be more true. But what I think MS is missing that few people are expecting and clamoring for FREE hardware (FreePC experiment notwithstanding) but many people are clamoring for FREE software. And the RIAA has helped ingrain that paying for digital bits is putting the money in the wrong pockets. So I think the leverage that MS expects from software is overestimated.
Maybe it is time to turn the ship like they did in 1995.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Try worldwide, not just in the US. The biggest percentile of those copies are in the US/Canada, yes, but the rest of the world has also bought quite a few copies (or got them bundled for free ala Australia).
I wasn't the original poster, but I'd kind of like you to shut the fuck up.
Personally I prefer Bungie's "It's done when it's done" attitude. Unlike other developers *cough* ValvE *cough* who lay down a firm release date and completely blow it, many times. So many companies do this and it's rather bothersome. Give me fair warning that the game just went gold and I'll buy it, but don't jerk me around with numerous delays breaking numerous "concrete" release dates.
Anyone who says that they hate a company for 'selling out' really has no idea of what goes on in the real world.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
I would like to point out that Bungie had *always* said that Halo would come out for Mac/PC.
I still think it's rather inexcusable that they didn't release it sooner, but my feeling is that MS pressured them into doing this, as Halo was one of the top X-Box games.
Also, by some people's accounts (no official ones, but then there are no official accounts on this that I'm aware of), Bungie was in serious financial trouble. With Oni being constantly delayed and looking more and more dissapointing, and similar things happening with Halo (do you remember that Halo was going to be 64 players/server, with long-scale battles? Destructible environments/distortable terrain? Much more open-ended and free-flowing gameplay? Third-person? The ability to play as Covenant or Humans (at least in MP)?) I do, and I feel fairly confident that this didn't happen because of the X-Box - the E3 2000 demos look almost identical to Halo on the X-Box), I've heard the buyout by MS to be made out as a saving grace for a company on it's last legs of funding.
Lastly, I don't really understand this whole "selling out" thing. If somebody comes up and offers me a bucket of money, as long as it doesn't violate my moral principles, then sure, I'll take it. Microsoft came to Bungie with a bucket of money and said "We'll give you this if you become one of our studios and make Halo an X-Box game." It doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and doesn't really seem to violate any principles that I'm aware of.
Of course, I could be wrong. Nobody really knows why they did it. And nobody probably ever will. The only thing that really matters is that they make good games, and so far they've still been doing that.
I, personally, don't blame them. Bungie are a lot more famous now than before joining with Microsoft, and Halo became pretty much the killer app for the X-Box. It's like having a go at a football player for signing for a team in a higher division who will pay more - loyal followers will be angry but that player wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity.
I should go check if Gravy Trader is out yet.
-C.
You are/were an EB employee, right?
Don't you believe in full disclosure when discussing - shilling for - your (perhaps former) employer?
Besides, what you say is obvious. EB is a game store, of course they will carry a larger variety of games than a general goods store that also sells games. But this is by virtue of the fact that you guys can use 100% of your floor space for games, which typically is larger than most game sections at general goods stores, not because you somehow manage to stock a magic low number of titles that only EB knows about.
The much much much more important profit center for EB is pre-owned games. EB stocks just enough new copies of a game so as not to be dismissed as a used-only game store, as well as to keep the trade-in cycle going. Everybody knows the ludicrous margins that EB makes on used games by issuing store credit (which can only be used at EB, and costs the store nothing until it is exchanged, generating float) in very low dollar-equivalent amounts, then reselling these games for, in many cases, 90% of the price for new copies of these games.
I don't present this to you as something you don't already know. I know that you do. I'm just curious why you are satisfied with people NOT knowing that you AREN'T a disinterested third party when you make statements about EB, especially misleadingly curt explanations about how the company makes its money.
Here's the Halo 2 Documentary (warning, requires WMP 9). Go 2:05 into the movie, and they'll show you a cinematic of a UNSC marine hugging a Covenant Elite. WTF? The marines are supposed to be killing the Covenant, not hugging them... sigh.
To those that pay attention to dev studios they're *infamous*.
To Joe Xbox, "Microsoft Games" made Halo and "Bungie" is one of a bunch of annoying logos that he has to press a button to skip.
As has been made crystal clear by Infogrames/Atari, Interplay and EA over the years, when it comes to brass tacks publishers say when a game gets released.
When devs are also publishers, as with Ye Olde Bungie and Blizzard, the policies are almost always "when it's done, it's done". That's a common idea among developers, not an unusual one.
The credit in this case goes to Microsoft Games, for serving the dev studio's needs, not Bungie, who like any other studio would obviously want as much time as possible to complete the game.
EB's profit structure is based around selling pre-owned games.
The selection for new releases hardly makes them $$, and the console sales actually break nearly even. They make a killing on people trading in a random game for 5 bucks and then later selling that same game for 30.
People still haven't figured out that EB does nothing to the games, they just put them back in cases. You get a much better deal going on eBay than you do at EB.
The only major difference aside from the price on eBay vs. EB is that EB will take back any used game that doesn't work. The policy is pretty flexible because (as you know) they don't really do anything to the games beyond slapping on a price tag.
;)
This does ignore some of the other sides of the equation, though. I tried to sell my Steel Battalion on eBay and got a non-paying high bidder who stalled me long enough that the next highest bidder wasn't interested anymore. eBay still charged me 20$ for selling it, even though I'd not made a penny (in fact, I was even worse off, because I bought the strategy guide I said I'd throw in if bidding went over 200$ USD). I have no such risk when I trade games in at EB -- they're going to give me something the moment I walk through their doors.
Plus, there are a lot of new titles there that can be had for considerably better prices than other stores. EB clears off its shelf space regularly for new product, something other chains (such as Toys'R'Us, which still has Einhander new for 70$ CDN) don't do.
If you're willing to shop around, you can find better deals. EB proves that most people don't care to shop around much on used game prices -- otherwise they wouldn't sell so much volume
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Wow, that's pretty close to what I might have said!
Considering the amount of highly awaited games currently being listed as having an April 1st release date, I get the impression that the entire videogame industry is preparing an April fool's joke of monumental proportions...
As for Halo, it's important to remember that Halo 1 was rushed so that it could be ready for the Xbox's launch, and ended up being a poorer game because of it. They're definitely doing the right thing by taking their time with the sequel.
Not that the kids who frequent this area of /. would undertstand...
I work for a university. Trust me: the kids who play Halo have no clue who developed it. Some of them don't even know that MS makes the Xbox... which then begs the question: how the hell did they get into college? But, I digress...
It's not a question of whether PC games are profitable. It is a question of Bungie keeping its identity within a larger entity - which it clearly hasn't (though it's clear they still can't ship on time). Blizzard, for example, has done a damn fine job of keeping its identity within the Vivendi family. Rockstar has a very clear identity in Take-Two. If Bungie had gone to one of those folks, it wouldn't be a case of "selling out" because they would have kept much of the old Bungie. But, when MS absorbed them, made the employees move to Redmond from Chicago (or leave the comapny) and basically blew away the true Bungie aesthetic, that is where one can clearly say "Bungie sold out."
> with Marathon, they tried releasing it
> before it was ready (when it was still
> just Pathways into Darkness II)
In this event you mention, they have not tried releasing Marathon before it was done, they just showed an early version at a Macworld and, yes, that got slammed because it was "just another PiD". The "Marathon Trilogy Box Set" has that and other pre-release versions - some of them were so bad, you needed Macsbug!
Much later, they indeed had to delay the game a few months because they lost a looooong time fine-tuning the multiplayer levels... nearly to the point they had to recreate all those levels from scratch!
Circumcision is child abuse.
whats the point? Halo wasnt that great of a game anyway... too many plain environments. i felt clostraphobic half the time...
Microsoft came to Bungie with a bucket of money and said "We'll give you this if you become one of our studios and make Halo an X-Box game." It doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and doesn't really seem to violate any principles that I'm aware of.
Most of Microsoft's money comes from illegal abuse of monopoly powers. See the recent anti-trust trial and the 1995 consent decree. Read the details of the consent decree - that's why Windows is around today. If Microsoft didn't do those things, then mentioning Windows to a casual computer user today would get you the same blank stare you'd get by mentioning, say, BeOS. We'd all be using OS/2, GEOS, GEM, Desqview, BeOS, or something else instead of Windows.
MS earned their money by illegal means. As far as I'm concerned, it's unethical to take that money.
i heard a little about that phantom thing.. isnt it that new system that is gonna be like on demand tv? I remember reading somethin like that in a magazine where u buy 7 games and then u exchange them every month for a small fee... if anyone has more information about it can u post the link.
...I worked there last Thursday and the release date in our system had been chagned from 'April' to 'June.'
I really don't expect it until xmas '04, and haven't since early last year. This whole 'don't set a concrete release date, then push it back every few months' really reeks of a scheme to get more pre-sales for retailers.
My $0.02
"Infants flesh will be in season throughout the year." -Swift
Halo was good on a console for the same reason Goldeneye was good. It's a great party FPS.
Apart from that... Well, I'll let those who've sold their console buying souls to Microsoft(and thus paid for their own shafting) answer.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
MS is probably trying to save their best card to counterstrike the PSP launch. After all, they can afford it. Anyway they are pretty much covered with triple A titles for the rest of the year (or at least the most important dates).
Ninja Gaiden/DOA online (march/april/summer(?))
Doom 3 (october/november/Halloween)
Halo 2 (December)
So yes, I would expect Halo 2 to be released until december, cry, laugh, cringe about it, then accept it, it is the best time for the title to ship.
p.s.
IMO theres as much chance of Half life 2 coming out this year as Duke nukem forever, I wish they could prove me wrong but I pretty much doubt it.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
"Selling out" is a term I'm more accustomed hearing from the arena of music, strangely you never hear about it from movie productions. Regardless, it's a silly and immature term coined by people who are lost in the past or determined to demonstrate their superiority over other people because they "knew about something first" or some such bullshit. After all folks let's face it, we live in a consumer society so in essence we are all sell outs. You like that car of yours? Great you're a sell out! Did you put an abit mother board in your computer? AWESOME! You get to be a sell out as well. Consumer society's are funded by profits, they had a chance to make a good game and make profits. If Halo had blown, then you could say they sold out because they took the money to produce a subpar product, clearly the product was not subpar. It's the best console FPS I've ever played, the story is fun and innovative and multiplayer is a blast.
In response to Edwdig, does being a citizen of the United States make me an unethical person because clearly the US government has done things that none would call ethical. Get off your high horse and stop living in fairy-tale land. Microsoft has always been an inferior operating system that was marketed to the masses better. That's not MS's fault, that's BeOS, OS/2, GEOS, GEM etc's fault because they didn't see how to make the money that MS did. Did the consumer lose out? Yes but it was the consumer who voted, not Gates.
That's not 'selling out.' That's 'making a sound business decision.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I have spoken with several local gaming shops and from the info,rumors,and from what bungie has done in the past this is what i think. Ok, 1st they say a 2nd halo is coming out. ( no suprise ) Then they say halo2 cuming holiday 2003. Yeah i dunno how long thev been workin on it but possibly but not liely that it will be shipped then. So they move it back about 5 months to April 1 or the 18th. Figures, typical bungie taking there time. The lastest info that iv heard, is that they are almost finished with the game and they could ship it around febuary. But weeks ago they had magor probs with the X-box Live multi-player modes so they are pushing the release date to around fall of 04. Or around sep. or oct. Anyway from what has happened in the past with bungie, i personly think they will save it 4 holiday 2004. It wouldn't suprise me, but thats just my opinion...