Allegedly another company has licensed the designs forom Microsoft and we’re supposed to start offering them later this year… Although there isn’t exactly much runway left this year and the only articles talk about the announcement so in January so who knows.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/discontinued-and-unreleased-microsoft-peripherals-revived-by-licensing-deal/

I’m gonna assume that this is because they are Microsoft now. They use a ton contractors on everything these days instead of actual employees but the catch is contractor can only stay there for 18 months and then have to leave or get hired so any experience on the project gets thrown away. Moving to unreal allows them to bring on a wider group of dev contractors so hopefully the ramp up isn’t as long. This is just a theory but the same thing happened to Halo since that’s moving to unreal to. If they just retained actual talent this wouldn’t be a problem and the games wouldnt suck as much even if engine was less advanced.