Multiple employees at Halo Studios say they have been laid off, about a week after the launch of Halo: Campaign Evolved. The Halo Studios layoffs mark another round of job cuts at the Xbox Game Studios developer formerly known as 343 Industries, and they follow a mixed critical reception and soft early sales for the remake.
None of the affected employees who have spoken publicly say Microsoft has tied the cuts directly to Campaign Evolved’s performance. The timing, a week after launch, has fueled speculation that the remake’s numbers played a role, especially given how closely the studio’s recent history has tracked the fortunes of its releases.
Halo has been one of Xbox’s flagship franchises since the first game launched in 2001, and Campaign Evolved was pitched as a way to bring the original trilogy to a wider audience on modern hardware. A soft reception for that project carries more weight than it would for a smaller release, given how much of Halo Studios’ recent output has centered on revisiting the series’ earlier chapters rather than building new ones.
Campaign Evolved sold fewer copies than expected
A July report from Alinea Analytics put Campaign Evolved’s sales at 900,000 copies on Xbox Series consoles and Windows, 425,000 copies on PlayStation 5, and 212,000 copies on Steam. On PS5 specifically, the remake sold fewer units in July than Palworld, Minecraft, and Grand Theft Auto 5, three older titles still active on the platform’s sales charts years after their original release.
Reviews for Campaign Evolved have been mixed across Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. Combined with the sales data, the reception supports theories that the remake underperformed against Microsoft’s expectations, even without an official statement connecting the numbers to the layoffs. The project carried added weight as Halo Studios’ first major cross-platform release, arriving on PS5 after decades of Halo games staying on Xbox and PC exclusively.
Employees confirm the cuts on LinkedIn
Several Halo Studios staff have posted about their departures on LinkedIn in the days since Campaign Evolved shipped. Paul Morris, a Scrum Master who joined Halo Studios in 2024 to work on Halo Infinite and Campaign Evolved, previously served as a Test Associate on Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo Wars, and Halo: Reach earlier in his career, giving him more than a decade of history with the franchise.
Nick Treitman worked as a Playtest Coordinator, Associate Producer, and Producer at Halo Studios starting in 2020, after stints as a Playtest Moderator at the now-closed Monolith Productions and as an Associate Game Tester at Nintendo. Caleb Lawrence joined as a Software Engineer on Halo Infinite and Campaign Evolved in 2022, following a role as an Application Engineer at HCA Healthcare.
It is not yet known how many other Halo Studios employees have lost their jobs, or which departments have been hit hardest. Microsoft has said it plans to cut 4,800 positions across the company by the end of its 2027 fiscal year, with 3,200 of those cuts coming from Xbox. The Halo Studios layoffs could be part of that broader plan rather than a standalone response to Campaign Evolved’s launch, though the two are not mutually exclusive.
Halo Studios layoffs follow a history of cuts
Halo Studios has gone through repeated layoffs in recent years, with job losses in both 2025 and 2023. By summer 2025, the studio employed only a few hundred people, down sharply from its size during the development of earlier Halo titles such as Halo Infinite, which at its peak involved a much larger internal team.
The studio’s next multiplayer project, an internal effort known as Project Ekur, was reportedly canceled after Campaign Evolved’s troubled development consumed resources. According to Rebs Gaming, Campaign Evolved was originally built primarily by external studios Abstraction and Virtuos under what Rebs Gaming described as an “aggressive” timeline set by Halo Studios. Halo Studios reportedly ended its contract with the two studios partway through development and redid much of their work internally before launch, a process that likely stretched the internal team thin in the months before release.
That kind of late-stage handoff is not unusual in large remaster projects, but it typically adds risk. Bringing outsourced work back in-house on a tight schedule leaves less time for polish and testing, which may help explain the mixed reviews Campaign Evolved received at launch.
What comes next for the Halo franchise
Rumors point to a Halo 2 remake, a Halo 3 remake, and a new game centered on the ODST characters as Halo Studios’ next projects. Campaign Evolved itself included several teasers pointing toward a Halo 2 remake, making it the most likely of the three to move forward first.
A PlayStation 5 release for that remake is not guaranteed. Campaign Evolved and Gears of War: Reloaded both sold poorly on PS5, and Microsoft has not announced a PS5 version of Gears of War: E-Day. Those results give Microsoft less incentive to prioritize PS5 support for future Halo remakes, even as the publisher has otherwise expanded its output to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch 2 over the past two years.
Given the difficulty Halo Studios has had porting assets into Unreal Engine 5, the recent layoffs, and reported leadership issues, Microsoft may again turn to external developers for the next Halo remake, or hand it to a smaller internal team working toward the studio’s next major initiative, Project Helix. Either path means Halo Studios enters its next project with fewer people than it had when Campaign Evolved began development, and with a launch behind it that gave Microsoft little reason to expand the team.
The cuts also arrive as Microsoft continues trimming staff across its gaming division more broadly, a pattern that has recurred each year since the company completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023. For Halo Studios specifically, the result is a smaller team tasked with maintaining one of Xbox’s most recognizable franchises while working through a backlog of remakes that will need to land better than Campaign Evolved did to justify the studio’s next round of investment.