"To date, we have been navigating work on the future of the series and continuing support for legacy Xbox 360 services. However, maintaining these services requires a significant amount of time and resources, impacting the studio's ability to support current and future projects such as Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite. Meanwhile, the time to use Xbox 360 services continues to drop month after month, creating an even greater imbalance between time and work required to maintaining them and impacting the entire Halo community. [...] Digital sales slowed significantly and physical sales of these legacy Xbox 360 games stopped in 2018. Each cycle t failure to maintain and support these services translates into time and energy not channeled towards the future of Halo ", reads Halo Waypoint, the series' institutional communication channel.
In light of this, Microsoft and 343 Industries announce that in December 2021 all services will be disconnected and the online features of the Halo games for Xbox 360 will be disabled, to allow the team to focus exclusively on the present and future of the series. The games that this decision will impact are Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 3, Halo 3 ODST, Halo Spartan Assault, Halo Wars, Halo Reach and Halo 4. Owners of these titles will be able to continue to download and / or play them, but will not be able to more access online functions.
343 Industries had already begun the migration of user-generated data on Xbox 360 to Halo: The Master Chief Collection in the fall of last year. Today the official communication arrives, accompanied by the interruption of the sale of Halo games in digital version on Xbox 360. All game DLCs, on the other hand, can be obtained for free. More warnings will be sent to players in the course of 2021, until December 2021 which will mark the cessation of online activities.
Meanwhile, the development studio continues to work on Halo Infinite: the game should have accompany the launch of Xbox Series X, but has been postponed to next year.