In any sufficiently-large team, the likelihood is pretty good that there will be some non-trivial number of workers who are dissatisfied with the decisions of the leadership. It’s quite normal for 5-10% of a studio’s staff to choose to leave each year even without job cuts. This is one reason most game studios are always hiring senior devs, they need to backfill positions that open up through normal attrition. When a company is looking to lower costs gradually, they go on a hiring freeze and let enough workers eventually churn out to get to their target headcount.

ALT

I am also not discounting the claims of “Incompetent Leadership”. It’s entirely possible that the leadership of the Halo Infinite team made some really frustrating decisions along the way, and most of us game devs are very opinionated when it comes to development decisions. Sometimes the leadership makes a call and it’s a bad one. I’ve seen it happen and had to support those bad decisions to the best of my ability. It’s certainly a morale hit when that happens, but no can hit 100% with every shot forever.

ALT

I don’t think Halo Infinite is particularly unique or different in their situation. It’s a AAA game built by an enormous team that was generally positively reviewed, but clearly had its flaws. That puts Halo into the same bucket as most major AAA games - Call of Duty, FIFA, Assassin’s Creed, and so on. I would actually be more surprised if there weren’t any former devs from any of those games calling the team leadership incompetent. The real question isn’t whether there was incompetence in the leadership (there probably was), but how much incompetence was there?

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