Ancient Post Get!
If Bungie is tired of developing Halo, I'm sure they can A) split themselves into multiple parts, some working on the next halos and some working on new genres. B) Hire an all new fresh team to make Halo, that isn't tired of working on it. C) Farm it out to another dev team within microsoft that would be eager to do it.
Going by development videos, comments, and Dean Takahashi's book, they've tried A before. Ultimately, they've always had to consolidate their efforts to ship Halo, dropping their other projects. During Halo 2's development, by the time of E3 '03, they had an engine whose renderer had to be almost completely rewritten, the missions they had up to that point had been scrapped shortly before that, and they had no content for the game (outside the demo level)--and the demo level wasn't even
fun. Things getting thrown away is part of the normal development cycle, but according to Takahashi, that was a more direct result of trying to have some higher-up guys try to lead a second project while another managed Halo 2's development. Whether this is ultimately true is more than a little iffy, but if it is, it's easy to see how Bungie could feel burned by this, much like we saw they were burned by the graphics of E3 2002 and 2003, only to severely cut back on the engine. That's why we saw what we did with last year's E3: A (hopefully relatively) simple scene in the then-current engine (with locked-in features/aspects/performance thresholds) that wouldn't kill the framerate. I don't see Bungie devoting a healthy portion of resources to any other project if they were to move on to another Halo FPS--XBLA titles for sure, though.
B) Would that be much different than C? That's like a guy hiring you for your excellent brick-laying skills, and then sending a guy you hired off the street 2 hours ago in your place. Sure, he may carry the same company nametag, but the customer probably isn't going to get what they expected and wanted.
C) We already see this with Halo Wars to some excent, and if another Halo FPS is called for it'll likely happen there. I fully expect Bungie to go this route.
Besides that, I can't help but see Bungie's worth as more than just "the Halo cow." Even though none of their other games enjoyed the commercial success of halo, they were (IMO) excellent games. I think the spiritual successor to Minotaur, Myth, Pathways into Darkness, etc. could all become pretty good sources of revenue. Or a brand new IP in a genre they haven't really touched. They probably couldn't become Halo, but there are plenty of other good dev teams out there, and I don't believe Bungie is necessary (from a primary developer POV) for the Halo IP to continue succeeding--so long as they support it in its various forms--and we should see whether this works for videogames as well when Halo Wars is released.
In other words, suck it up Bungie.
Do we hear that polyphony digital is tired of making racing games? That Nintendo is tired of Mario games? (and pokeman game..and mario kart games..and smash brothers games..and luigi games..and mario rpg games..)? Thought not.
Sucking it up might be a large number of employees realizing Bungie = Halo, and moving on to (smaller) and better things.
Not that we've ever really heard Bungie complain either. They've certainly hinted they want to move on, however. Also, what's the greatest number of mario games any (well, let's say top 20 people) one person has worked on? Of course, I'm looking at this from the perspective that people can only do their best work when they are highly self-motivated to get the job done. Money can go a long ways, but I've seen far more examples of where it falls short of the former.
Edit: Also, really off-topic here! This topic is for pimping Gears of War's 2.7million + copies sold world wide!
