Halo Wars web services to be decommissioned

It has been a long time since the release of Halo Wars back in 2009 and since then we have seen a new Definitive Edition re-make of Halo Wars on Xbox One and PC. The original Halo Wars on Xbox 360 has been going strong, available on backwards compatibility and still playable to this day. Microsoft have however released some news about some Halo Wars functionality which will be shortly decommissioned for the original release.

The Halo Wars web services which sit behind the scenes on HaloWars.com and in-game multiplayer are being switched off come the end of March. While this does NOT mean that multiplayer will be discontinued, it does mean that there are some changes to certain additional services. Most notably, HaloWars.com will be switched off completely from March 30th, this means there will be no access to stat tracking, leaderboards and such like. It will also mean the multiplayer buckets will show as “Low Population” in game (and possibly that there are zero players online). Unfortunately this functionality was not carried forward to the Definitive Edition (somewhat, contrary to its name).

Multiplayer games will still be playable on the original Xbox 360 version (and of course, on the Definitive edition). Microsoft commented:

The web services that run behind the original Halo Wars are being deactivated in light of aging hardware issues and evolving customer privacy & security requirements across Microsoft. After spending time to assess and investigate, the decision was made to phase out these services as the game was built in a different era using outdated hardware, systems, and code that doesn’t scale to meet the requirements of the future. Again, there will be no impact to gameplay and your ability to play Halo Wars on Xbox 360 solo or with friends.

The Halo Wars developer blogs have been archived on this website and we will soon undertake the archiving of homepage posts and other content.