Is the Haloverse getting too big?

Frank O'Connor before he sold his soul...
Since Halo 2 set the standard for the marketing and hype of a computer game, the expectations for Halo 3 were huge. You could not turn the telly on without being told to "Believe" (we did!) or buy a Mountain Dew without the Master Chiefy starring back at you.


Since 2007 when Halo 3 was launched, the Halo franchise has become a truly global product. Halo Wars followed. A Graphic novel followed. A zillion model toys and figures and busts were made. ODST followed. Halo Reach was announced for 2010 and 343 Industries was created by Microsoft to manage the ever expanding Halo Universe. Halo Waypoint is now live and ready for download to your Xbox 360.


My point is Halo has become huge. Some might say its the Star Wars of its generation. That's a big call but you get the idea.


The question is, is there too much Halo? Is the Haloverse being diluted? Will the fans get overloaded with Spartan glory? People way ahead of me have already asked the question of Frank O'Connor. He's the former Bungie employee who sold his soul to the devil that is Microsoft. Well, that's how some may see it. I prefer to see him as the wise Yoda of the Haloverse, calmly guiding us Halo fans to gamer glory. Here's some Q&A with Frankie.


Yo Frankie: Do you ever worry about the franchise becoming over-saturated? How do you keep people interested in Halo?

Well, I mean, I worry about that constantly, but bluntly speaking, we just came off the launch of a game, and there's really no more material out there than there typically is. I think the big difference this time are the two projects you mentioned in terms of scale, which are Waypoint and Legends, which are a little bigger than the kind of support stuff and ancillary canonical stuff that we typically do year-in, year-out.
I mean, we have five New York Times best-selling novels, the encyclopedias you mentioned, one of Marvel's best-selling graphic novels, comic books series, all that stuff. All of that stuff has existed in the past, and it exists because of one simple reason, which is demand. So, we wouldn't make it if we weren't continually being asked for it via consumers and then via the partners that we talked about like Marvel and Tor Books. I worry about it all the time, and we obviously turn down almost infinitely more stuff than we actually produce, but when we produce it, there's a good reason, and a good plan, and a strong demand.

I don't suppose you could give an example of something you've turned down?

I can't, because it would be a big partner, but you know, you can imagine the kinds of things that we would turn down. For example, we made a Halo Risk game because it was based on Halo Wars, and Risk and real-time strategy kind of had a natural connection, and there was a strong demand for it. That's stuff's measured by the retailers and the partners that we license from. They get these requests. You know, they'll get a request from a store saying, "We want more Halo stuff. Can't you do anything in this genre?" So that one made sense, but we've had other requests to do board games that didn't make any sense. They didn't match the material. There was a demand for it, but if it doesn't actually make sense, and it's completely crazy, we won't do it.
So there you have it. If demand equals supply, Microsoft is prepared to release more Halo goodness on the universe, provided its a quality product. Which basically means one day they WILL give us the Halo equivalent of Ja Ja Binks.
Check out the fuller interview with Frank O'Connor. The interview goes on to talk about, in length, the prospects for the Xbox's Halo Waypoint and the possibilities it could have for game integration....