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."

Comments

Bah, they should've just kept the April 1st date

[Rayonic]

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.

Re: when it's ready

[Quixotic Raindrop]

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.

As usual: RTFA

[Babbster]

The projected release date for Halo 2, according to this article, has NOT slipped. 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.

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).

April 1st huh?

[exick]

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.

Really, no firm date? No surprise.

[Inoshiro]

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).

Re: when it's ready

[Quixotic Raindrop]

Maybe you're not familar with the history of Bungie. Let me 'splain it to you.

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" ... which, eventually, was handeled by outsiders. Three years later.

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.

What ! Me Hurry ? Ha ha

[leoaugust]

He also said it was unlikely Microsoft would make any major hardware upgrades to the Xbox before the current business cycle ends, as Sony has done with PS2.

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

1. Remember, we brought Windows 1 out in 1983 and we didn't have any real volume until 1991. It took us eight years to get volume. I don't know when we got profit, but it took us eight years to get volume.
2. Take Windows server. We started on it in 1988, but it was probably 1998 before we had real volume, and I don't know when we would have said we had profitability on that product.
3. I feel very good that we have great teams to take MSN and Xbox in exactly those same directions.

"They do their tuning with hardware, we do our tuning with software," he said.

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.

Re: when it's ready

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: when it's ready

[TwistedSquare]

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.

Re:The thing I'm annoyed about is...

[Jesus 2.0]

I take it that you never completed the original Halo on "Legendary" level, because if you had, you would have already seen a marine hugging an Elite.

It actually made some sense in context, and was funny, in a way.

Yea, true as well.

[Inoshiro]

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 ;)

Probably this has to do with the PSP launch

[AzraelKans]

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.