Halo Wars was an RTS that was well received and managed to sell a decent amount, however, it was not developed by Bungie but by creators of the fantastic Age of Empires franchise, Ensemble Studios.
Bungie was upset that their franchise was given out to others and called it ‘whoring out’. I can understand what they’re trying to say, but Microsoft has to make money, right?
“Microsoft was pretty risk averse and they said, ‘I don’t know if we want to take the risk of creating strategy games on a console. We’d feel better if Halo were attached to it.’The difficult part of that was it took the game back about a year in development, and I think it never quite turned out the same,” Ensemble founder Tony Goodman said to GamesIndustry International.
“They just said, ‘Why don’t you just paint over what you have with Halo stuff?’ But things aren’t quite that simple.
“Another problem was that Bungie was never up for it… Bungie was kind of sore about the idea. What they called it was ‘the whoring out of our franchise’ or something. Yeah, that didn’t create a great relationship between us and Bungie; they viewed us as someone infringing [on their franchise].”
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