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As the gaming industry continues to reel from the radioactive fallout of yesterday’s colossal Xbox layoffs, a former Halo dev shared a story demonstrating just how out-of-touch the people in charge can be. On Bluesky, Dan Callan, a mission designer on Halo 4, talked about the time he got to demo the game for Don Mattrick, who was in charge of the Xbox business at the time. Callan said that as he was showing off the Mantis, one of the new mechs the Master Chief gets to run around in, Mattrick asked an odd question about a completely unrelated game.
“Has anyone here played…Diablo 3?”
Callan said that Mattrick asked because the Xbox boss thought it’d be a good idea for Halo 4 to have a Diablo 3-style real-money auction house to in order to sell skins for the mech. Rather than call him out on that awful idea (because, if you’ll recall, that particular element of Diablo 3 was legendarily unpopular), Callan and his colleagues demurred.
“Every single human being around him reacted like this was an amazing groundbreaking idea,” he wrote. “While simultaneously realizing this was the stupidest shit imaginable since everyone with a brain had seen how hard that blew up in their face.” Thankfully it was not Halo 4‘s fate to have such a heinous feature added to it at a time when Callan said the game was “90% done.”
While a funny little anecdote, the story is another data point in the trend of gaming bosses being woefully out-of-touch with both their products and their audience. It was a well-known sentiment that gamers hated Diablo 3‘s real-money auction house, but because “money” was in the name, Mattrick probably thought it was a good idea for Halo 4 to get in on some of that action. Tim Sweeney can’t fucking stop Monday Morning Quarterbacking about how genAI could have saved Destiny 2 from its lamentable fate on top of his other asinine ideas. And now we have Asha Sharma saying that she hopes for Xbox to “entertain more than a billion people each day” while cracking open the bones of its studios and sucking out the marrow. These are the people who have been chosen to shepherd this damaged industry into some kind of glorious future. But they’re in charge right now, and look where we are.