The 343 Industries shooter exclusive to PC and Xbox consoles is at its worst on the Valve platform with a considerable drop in players compared to its premiere.
They kept breaking the game on steam deck every release to the point that I and many others stopped caring also battle passes and FOMO tactics… I play it occasionally but the story has always been the draw for me. Now they are just changing the story every game.
Game play itself is OK but every game starting with halo 4 has had a terrible plot because they won’t commit to a story.
Sure but Online dropped first for free so people were happy to pick it up on Steam
The campaign release was later and was included within GamePass so people made the switch then, in fact there was a large drop in Steam numbers the month after the release of Campaign likely due to people swapping over to GamePass
I’m not denying a loss in player count across all services, that absolutely has happened (and to a degree is expected to happen no game maintains the peak players) i’m saying that Steam metrics are very poor for tracking Microsoft releases
Sea of thieves has lost around 66% of average players compared to 2020 on Steam despite the fact it actually has a much larger active player count now (Though of course less than the 2021 peak)
There’s a lot going on around Infinite and Halo/343 as a whole that makes titles and articles like these really difficult to understand and have an honest discussion around. Even though not many people play on Steam, there are other ways to play it on PC and Infinite is still the 6th-most played game on Gamepass, with it still being relatively popular on its main platform - Xbox. At the same time, though, there are some long-standing and glaring issues with 343’s Halo, and it’s not terribly surprising that Infinite didn’t end up capturing and retaining the playerbase it maybe ought to have.
On one side, people in the gaming community (and the Halo community) eat up articles that go “XYZ game is DEAD because-” as it allows some pretty easy grandstanding and attention (or over on reddit/twitter, imaginary internet points farming). For the most part, Infinite is in a pretty okay state in terms of content (after 1.5 years) and player levels, and an article like this one is easy rage-bait for people to interact with.
On the other side, it’s not terribly surprising that this happened. Before Infinite, I would argue that all of 343’s games were resounding flops - not monetarily, they all sold well, but in terms of quickly diminishing playercounts, negative reactions from the community, meager launch content, or even flat-out not working (looking at the initial launch of MCC), 343 had yet to hit a homerun with Halo. The first few weeks of Infinite were great, but the cracks started to show quickly. Bugfixes were non-existent - such as when the BTB playlist broke in December and it took 2 months for 343 to fix it. Content delivery was also non-existent, the game shipping with very few modes and maps with the supposed 3-month seasons being delayed into being 6 to 9 months long, with the bulk of updates being for cosmetic content or modes that had been there on launch-day for other Halo titles. The challenge and cosmetic systems were explicitly frustrating and designed to be so, under the pretense of making people grind/play more, but which ended up having the exact opposite effect and drove players away. Shop and cosmetic prices were ludicrous, and there was no consistent stat or rank-tracking systems. No Forge. No custom games browser. Theater doesn’t work. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Even though Infinite is in a decent spot now and I find it fun to play, it’s not surprising at all that the playerbase is at levels lower than it should be. No, Infinite or Halo aren’t “dead,” but 343 has done a good job at whittling down a titan of a franchise into a middling AA-level game that only the most die-hard fans care much about.
Really sad. I managed to reach Onyx rank but the FOMO was real (even though they said there would be no FOMO).
The gameplay was actually really good, but the busy-work to complete challenges ruined the experience for me.
When playing a competitive shooter, the top priority should be winning. When I need to remember to kill three enemies with the shock rifle, run over five people, tea-bag my own teammate and get a 360 no-scope with my finger in my ass, I’m not thinking about winning or playing how I want.
Also 343 were just cunts about everything the entire time.
Maybe unpopular opinion… Should Halo invert its focus? Currently it’s multiplayer first, singeplayer second. If the multiplayer modes cannot maintain a playerbase then its not going to be a main driver of success. The battle royale and hero shooter crazes haven’t left much room for the Halo multiplayer format to succeed these days: most of the potential players are focusing on something else.
I think if they could deliver kickass campaigns consistently that they could keep Halo as a successful franchise. If they keep chasing multiplayer it’ll fade into obscurity soon enough.
This whole thing is especially heartbreaking because at its core, the game is great. Running around and shooting feels better then Halo has in a long time. It was just ruined by corporate fuckery.
343 has never been good at managing a Halo game. Not sure what OP is referring to specifically but 343 has made tons of awful decisions with the franchise. One thing that always bothered me with infinite is from what I remember the game has an enormous amount of tech debt because Microsoft loves to hire temporary contract workers so by the time a new contractor was hired and brought up to speed on the new engine they were developing/had developed, they barely had time to do much before having to be replaced with another contractor, which makes me feel awful for the poor developers hired on these temp contracts.
343 has never been good at managing a Halo game. Not sure what OP is referring to specifically but 343 has made tons of awful decisions with the franchise.
Agreed 100%. Halo 4 was the beginning of the end for Halo, imo. I thought Reach was fun, but I was never a big fan of the sprinting, armor classes and weapon bloom. It still felt like Halo overall, though. I remember playing Halo 4 on launch day and immediately being disappointed. I still probably put 100+ hours into it at the time, but I remember thinking it didn’t truly feel like Halo — at least not like its predecessors.
In a nutshell: corporate greed. The only part of the game that was live service was the paid cosmetics.
At launch, their entire idea of more ‘content’ was just visual cosmetics. If you look at their communications at the time it will all make sense.
They constantly referred to an internal ‘live service’ team separate from the rest of the game, and that team was effectively the ‘cosmetics team’.
People talk about contractors, but this was the real problem. They thought they could get away with barely adding any real content and selling tons of cosmetics.
Amazing core gameplay, but a lack of content. The game was pushed as a half-assed live service game, but they never released content at anything close to a live service rate. Coupled with pretty horrendous progression/aggressive MTX pricing at the start, and well…
It’s so sad because the base gameplay is fantastic, but the way 343 chose to do playlists with so few weapons, maps, and game modes available it absolutely killed the game.
I’m not really surprised. I feel like Halo has been losing steam for a while and Infinite had the vibe of the devs doing everything popular because it makes money not because they had an awesome idea.
This right here. I think the popularity of Battlebit proves this point. If devs make a game that they themselves would want to play, they create a great game. If the game is made via committee and how much profits the suits can squeeze out of it there is a good chance the game sucks.
While that’s self-evidently true for some of Infinite, Halo also actively avoided a lot of the dark patterns that would’ve kept people playing. It was, unfortunately, kind of the worst of both worlds. The battle passes stick around forever, events repeat, almost all externally-advertised cosmetics were free. It’s supposed to be a system that works for the players, and it more or less does (in comparison to, say, Fortnite), but it also means that you don’t have a reason to sign back in every single day and grind through something to get enough currency to buy the new skin you like, and most people aren’t financially investing themself much in playing it.
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