Is it really their premier franchise anymore? MCC, Infinite launch, etc… I do not think they plan to cut and run, they would love it to be yet another reason for people to stay subscribed to GamePass, but beyond that they seem to be ready to cut their losses if they had to with Infinite.
Halo MCC illustrates my point perfectly. They completely bungled the technology underlying the game in a way that would require them to go back and rearchitect technology built across 12 different engines spanning over a decade. That's the classic situation where you cut your losses and move on. Yet 343 spent years behind the scenes fixing up the technology to the point where it could deliver on the original vision, and then they ported all the games to the PC *and* added ODST and Reach. And they were still updating it until Halo Infinite launch. So that's basically 6 years of support for a title that should have been dead in the water.
And the result is that they got an additional 10 million players on PC, and are still in the top 50 most played games on Xbox in the US, where for example there isn't a single Battlefield title. You need to "lower your risk" when you have a new IP or experimental game design. But Halo already comes with a huge audience, even if you're going to quibble as to whether it is really bigger than GoW or Forza. And Infinite has the most standard multiplayer modes ever, and even planned (or rumoured) additions like Forge and Warzone/ Warzone Firefight have already proved themselves. And when you have such a large audience on day 1, it makes sense to ship the most content possible, so your multiplayer base can keep growing. Not ship a small selection of content, and then update at a slower rate than any standard boxed release.
The fact that Infinite's strategy makes zero sense, makes me think the issues are really development related and nothing to do with some GaaS edict from above. When literally the head of the direction of the studio is saying publicly that development is too slow, you know there is a problem.
It is not the amount of updates you get post launch, it is how the launch game is designed and the content that is available at launch (compare Infinite with Elden Ring and see the difference). GaaS games are thought and designed to establish a foothold and distribute development costs over time as well as give you the ability to develop only the content you need to and the more data you get the more you can develop content that you think will be successful thus lowering your risk.
Games routinely ship unfinished, so if releasing a barebones product is necessary condition to be a GaaS title (and that's pretty debateable!), I don't think we can say it is a
sufficient one. The idea behind GaaS is that with constant updates the player base can continue to grow over time, rather than shifting from one title to the next. If you just ship a barebones title and then do nothing for months, people will simply jump ship, which is what is happening to Infinite. So again, the launch strategy simply doesn't make sense. Unless – the real issues are development related.