UPDATE — September 25: Rebs Gaming has shared more detail about what Halo Studios was reportedly planning before the layoffs. He says a small team presented Xbox executives with a concept update for Halo 7 just a week before the cuts, with campaign, PvP, PvE and Forge proposed for launch. According to his sources, the game was still years away, which lines up with the report below.

Rebs also says the studio was exploring Halo 2 and 3 remakes and a smaller First Strike adaptation targeting 2027. The timeline for those projects is less clear: his earlier reports have described the remakes as being in active development while also saying the studio had no new campaign or multiplayer game in active development. We don’t yet know when work on First Strike began, how far it got, or whether it survived the layoffs. Rebs says a more detailed report on that project is coming.

For now, reporting seems contradictory and confusing about what was and was not in development at Halo Studios.

ORIGINAL STORY: This week brought more seismic shifts for the Xbox brand, including the news that Halo Studios is being demoted to a support studio for existing Halo games, while Activision is putting together a team to make the next mainline entry in the series.

So what the hell was going on at Halo Studios? Well, according to Tom Warren at The Verge, sources have informed him that Halo Studios next Halo game was “years away from shipping.”

That seems to go against a prior claim that Halo Studios wasn’t actually working on anything at all, a report which also conflicted with another claim that remakes of Halo 2 and 3 were already greenlit before Halo: Campaign Evolved even came out.

According to Warren’s source, with a new Halo game still being years away, “Microsoft pulled the plug instead” and handed Halo to Activision. This seems to be because one of Asha Sharma’s big pushes is to get more of Xbox’s biggest titles out the door on a much quicker and more consistent timeline.

So what was going at Halo Studios? We don’t really know. Based on the insider news we’ve seen, we can’t even be sure if they had a game in development or not. All we can say with certainty, is that Halo Studios hasn’t lived up to the reason it was created in the first place: Halo has gone from being the iconic Xbox flagship to a shadow of its former self. Like former Xbox boss Phil Spencer said back in 2011, “If we lose our way with Halo, we lose our way with Xbox.”