343 Studios recently announced they were rebranding themselves to "Halo Studios", and moving development of future Halo games to Unreal Engine 5. As an engine designed for deployment across multiple platforms, this change makes a hypothetical PlayStation port of Halo far easier.
Halo has been struggling for decades. Not dying, but certainly struggling. And one of the clear reasons for the franchise's fall off since Halo 3 is that Xbox has been losing the console war. There just aren't enough players out there on Xbox for Halo to meaningfully compete with non-exclusives like Call of Duty.
Naturally, then, many have been left wondering whether Xbox will ever relent and let Halo go non-exclusive. We have no idea whether they will, but with the recent announcement that future Halo games will be developed on UE5, it's at least far more doable now.
With Halo on UE5, a PS-port finally sounds reasonable
In a recent interview with EuroGamer, the head of Digital Foundry, Rich Leadbetter, made it clear that with Halo now being developed on Unreal Engine 5, releasing the game on PlayStation will now be far easier if ever the devs choose to do so:
From a multi-platform game development perspective, moving to Unreal Engine 5 would certainly be easier for the developer than porting across the existing Slipspace engine. It stands to reason that an engine designed for deployment across multiple platforms would be easier to work with than existing technology built for Xbox and PC.
Of course, this is all mere speculation. Nobody know what the future of Halo looks like, but with multiple future titles now in development, we can at least say the possibility of one of those releasing on PlayStation is more plausible. Fingers crossed!
Would you like to see Xbox cross that Rubicon and make Halo available to all platforms, or do you see it as one of the last great exclusives, too important to the identity of Xbox to be shared?