Today's changes might get Xbox a new Halo sooner, but history shows production line development makes for boring games

Feeling the squeeze

When I was younger, I loved Chewits. Each parcel of chewy sugar threatened to tear out a tooth, but their punch of strawberry, blackcurrent, and orange flavour was hard to resist. Left to my own devices, I would take packs of Chewits, unwrap all the sweets, and press them together in the palm of my hand until they formed a single Chewit boulder. The different colours and flavours became indistinguishable but the sheer size and density of the thing was attractive to my inner glutton. The first time I did this, I put the whole thing into my mouth and when I tried to bite down on the sweet mass my jaw became almost glued together by the sugary morass. Panicking, I tried to swallow it down and almost choked, as the formless Chewitts filled my oesophagus. Before I turned completely blue, I was able to cough it back up.

I want to say I only did this once, but it took a good three or four times before I realised squashing things together, while it seems could only multiply each Chewits' amazingness, can actually make a formless mass that will choke you.

So, onto Xbox's plans to consolidate their studios.

There will be sensible business-minded people stroking their beards at Xbox's announcement, pointing out that studios like Bethesda and Obsidian share many synergies. After all, Obsidian have worked on Bethesda's most famous properties, and the Fallout: New Vegas developers are already hard at work on a new Fallout game. Rare's most successful game, Sea of Thieves is a live service game, and Activision Blizzard have been operating online live service games through World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Diablo for decades. And, well, Activision have perfected producing Call of Duty games on time every year without fail – something that can't be said of 343 Industries Halo efforts.

And, while they may have a point, there are two things I say to them: first, are Xbox competent enough to make that work? And, two, even if they did, doesn't that make for an immensely boring future?

To the first point, Xbox have done little to suggest they actually know what to do with the studios they own. With Rare's Everwild, The Initiative's Perfect Dark, and Undead Lab's State of Decay 3, we saw studios spend years in pre-production before their games were cancelled or abandoned. Or, as in the case of Mojang and Activision Blizzard, effectively carry on with business as usual, none of which is embellished by their new owners. Or worse still, a developer manages to get a great game out, it's recognised as being exactly the sort of thing Xbox wish it did more, and then they close the studio down anyway.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma herself spelled out how bad at the game business they are back in July when she wrote that "in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested." They are not a company that have proven they know what they're doing. How about another one, last year they renamed 343 Industries Halo Studios and this year they are moving the series to Activision and 268 members of the team.

I really don't want to dwell on the business decisions, though. Playing fantasy football with game studios may be a fun mental exercise – what would a Gears of War from Obsidian look like, or a Halo by Rare, or a Minesweeper by Treyarch – but when those conversations are spurred by studio closures and layoffs, it very quickly diminishes the human cost of the corporation's shrugging.

What I'm more interested in talking about is what consolidation looks to spell for these studios and their games' futures. Back in June, Sharma said Xbox had "found ourselves overextended" and that while they owned "industry-definining franchises" they had "not adequately funded them to compete and win." That statement, coupled with today's announcements, basically confirms what has been suspected for a while: Xbox are doubling down on their biggest series and pushing to get more of them out more quickly.

Whether that manifests as quite the frequency of Call of Duty, with a new Fallout and Halo game released every year remains to be seen. However, what this means for the creativity and quality of the games is more predictable. We have seen time and again over the past decades that when publishers push for annual releases, the quirks of individual studios are worn down or erased entirely, innovation is flattened, and series fall deeper and deeper down their own lore-holes.

Take, for example, Assassin's Creed. After the release of the second game, Ubisoft moved to annual releases and kept to that pace for the next seven years. Development of each title was technically led by one studio, but in reality tens of teams and hundreds of staff around the world worked on the games. Over that time, the series moved away from the social stealth beginnings to more of an amorphous open world every-game.

At the time, Ubisoft also had its central editorial team which would consult across all their games. While that was supposed to make sure developers shared what they learned across projects, in reality it also meant most games ended up with lookout towers, crafting, and a battle pass. When you are looking to make something quickly, you stop asking if there are different or better ways of doing something, you just go with what works and move onto the next thing. Or, put another way, it's how Ubisoft ended up making Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. It wasn't until Ubisoft clocked that players were burning out on their same-y, increasingly buggy releases, and stopped buying them in such high numbers that they dropped annual releases. And, in moving away from annual release, it allowed teams the time to make radical changes like those seen in Assassin's Creed Origins and, later, move away from the every-game and work on things like the more focused Assassin's Creed Mirage.

Again and again, developers say that pushing for annual releases stifles their ability to experiment, innovate, and keep on top of quality. In a briefing back in December, Elder Scrolls Online's game director Nick Giaomini complained that annual expansions for the MMO had "become predictable and too formulaic". The problem he said was that "It took 18 months to do. It was all hands on deck to support. That lead time just didn't really leave much room to react to player feedback or address long standing issues." (This was, of course, before Xbox then fired more than a hundred staff).

In the past year, Xbox have shown repeatedly that they want to cut off the parts of themselves that are distinct. Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Arkane were all sold or parcelled up and made independent. So, the aspect of this consolidation that I think will be most destructive is that pushing studios to release games more frequently demands that game development is split across many studios, each working on constituent parts. Yes, Activision manage to release a new Call of Duty each year, and they've done it for longer and with much greater consistency than Ubisoft's efforts, but those games are each strange picnic baskets of singleplayer campaigns and multiplayer modes all made by different teams. There is almost no attempt to make a cohesive game.

Other publishers try for something a little more holistic, but even then, they end up with games that carry little of the makers' identities. Over at EA, for instance, Burnout makers Criterion are now simply one studio of many making Battlefield games. As a team with many years of driving game development experience, their focus so far in the series has been developing the games' vehicle segments in the singleplayer game, but played in isolation it would be difficult to identify their hand, or point out what was made by the other teams.

So, in bringing more studios under Activision's umbrella, adding Obsidian to Bethesda's roster, and merging Playground and Turn 10, Xbox may think they're activating synergies across the portfolio setting themselves up for some great growth momentum next quarter, but I just see a ball of mashed up Chewits. Nothing about squeezing all these teams together signals that it will multiply their games' amazingness.

You might argue that running a corporation is different to a greedy child stuffing their face with sweets; I would disagree.