Halo Developer 343 Industries is Rebranding and Switching to Unreal

It's a milestone for the IP Halo. Developer 343 Industries is changing its name to Halo Studios and announcing that it will use Unreal Engine 5 instead of its in-house Slipspace technology for future game projects. Studio head Pierre Hintze also confirmed that several Halo games are in development.

The Microsoft studio behind the current Halo games itself speaks of a new chapter being started, which applies equally to the company itself and to the IP. "If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters. Chapter 1 – Bungie. Chapter 2 – 343 Industries. Now, I think we have an audience which is hungry for more. So we’re not just going to try to improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games. So, we start a new chapter today", Pierre Hintze said. Hintze has been studio head of 343 Industries since 2022, which has now been given a new name: Halo Studios.

The new name, however, is only the smallest change. This is because Halo Studios will no longer rely on the in-house Slipspace Engine for the development of future Halo games, but is switching to Unreal from Epic Games. "The way we made Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future. So part of the conversation we had was about how we help the team focus on making games, versus making the tools and the engines", COO Elizabeth van Wyck explains the decision.

Although the technology has been continuously developed, Unreal offers possibilities that would not have been available with Slipspace. It would take a massive amount of time and resources to replicate them in Slipspace.

That's why they started an internal project called Project Foundry. It doesn't represent a new game, but it goes well beyond a classic tech demo. The people in charge at Halo Studios showed Foundry at the 2024 Halo World Championship and announced the renaming and switch to Unreal. "We should talk about things when we have things to talk about, at scale. Today, it’s the first step – we’re showing Foundry because it feels right to do so – we want to explain our plans to Halo fans, and attract new, passionate developers to our team. The next step will be talking about the games themselves," Hintze said. And he confirmed that there is more than one Halo Game in development. But that seems to be the story for another day.