Bungie: Our new IP isn't tied to Microsoft

Bungie, the developer behind the best-selling Xbox 360 franchise Halo, has revealed that it is currently hard at work on new IP alongside Halo 3: Recon, and that it is not limited by any agreement with Microsoft in terms of being restricted to particular platforms.

"No, we're not [tied into a specific platform for new IP]," said community and PR director Brian Jarrard, speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at this year's Tokyo Game Show. "We haven't gotten that far yet to be totally honest.

"In theory we do have every means to go out and find the right ecosystem, the right partners, to align with. So who knows what the future will bring us."

However, while that may mean any future non-Halo projects might make their way to Sony or Nintendo platforms, it's not a decision that's been made yet - and the company has praised the social community "synergy" of the Xbox 360 platform.

"For us the 360 has been great because there's just been this great synergy with Bungie because all of our games have this inherent social community aspect," explained Jarrard. "Everything we've ever done has this very big online component - we, together with the Xbox consoles, have continued to push that Live experience, the whole notion of a party experience forward.

"I like to think that we brought a lot of that to the market, and we want to keep iterating on that. In that regard Live has been a great service to us. It's astonishing to look at how well Halo 3 is doing even now, a year after release.

"We haven't really seen much of a decline in play, and we recently surpassed the lifetime number of games ever played on Halo 2 - so we're talking about four years of Halo 2 boiling down to about 1 year of Halo 3.

"It's been pretty astounding, and to see our fans stand by us, it's even more reason why we want to do Halo 3: Recon, just to give something back and extend the experience a little bit longer."

The full interview with Bungie's Brian Jarrard is available now.