KIRKLAND, Wash. — A team of hundreds here was recently putting the final touches on a video game expected to be one of the biggest sellers of the holiday season.

The game, Halo 5: Guardians, will depict interstellar combat in new levels of graphical realism and offer new twists in multiplayer capabilities. It will be the latest game in the Halo series, one of the biggest in the industry, with more than $3.5 billion in global sales, almost the global box-office take of the “Fast & Furious” movie series.

But Microsoft, the company that makes the game, cannot afford to coast on warm feelings alone for the Halo series, as other big game franchises, like Call of Duty, have overshadowed it. So the team making the game, as well as Microsoft’s marketing machine, is focusing on the booming world of competitive video games — in particular, making sure that it appeals to elite gamers.

The world of e-sports, as the competitive video game world is known, was long an afterthought for game makers. That is quickly changing, though, as e-sports events fill giant arenas and millions of people watch live video of competitions online.