Nick Treitman spent six and a half years at Halo Studios watching layoff rounds come and go without touching him. That streak ended this week.
“After 6.5 years working on Halo and dodging just as many rounds of layoffs — it has finally caught up to me,” Treitman wrote on LinkedIn. “I have nothing but love for Halo and the folks at the studio, this is just a tough reality in the gaming industry right now.”
Treitman was a producer on Halo: Campaign Evolved and, by his own description, the “product owner of Halo Infinite’s social multiplayer pillar.” He’s one of several employees at the studio whose roles have been cut, first reported by Insider Gaming and then confirmed by the workers themselves in a steady trickle of LinkedIn posts.
Paul Morris, a scrum master who’d been at the studio for over two years, is out too.
“Today, I learned my time at Halo Studios will be coming to an end following the successful launch of our latest game, Halo: Campaign Evolved,” his post reads. “I know this is one of the most challenging job markets our industry has seen, and I know the road ahead won’t be easy.”
Caleb Lawrence, a software engineer on Campaign Evolved, hasn’t posted an announcement. He has quietly flipped his LinkedIn to “available for work,” which tells you the same thing.
The reviews said the opposite
Here’s what makes the timing land so strangely. Campaign Evolved shipped to broad critical praise. Not unanimous, but close enough.
VGC handed it a 10/10 and said the remake gives “reason to be optimistic that the series’ best days are still ahead.” Game Informer went 8.5/10, calling it a “superb update and rebuild of what made the original great.” We’d put it among the best remakes ever made.
None of that mattered to the spreadsheet.
This was always coming
Last month Xbox announced it would lay off more than 3,200 employees across all of its studios, a process that rolls out gradually until July 2027. Halo Studios is simply the latest name on that list.
Whether more cuts hit the studio specifically is still to be determined.
What isn’t in doubt is the roadmap. A remake of Halo 2 has been all but confirmed, and Halo 3 likely follows. Xbox isn't backing off its plan to keep rebuilding the older games in the series.
It’s just doing it with fewer of the people who made the last one.
