So why is there only one playlist for the multiplayer besides firefight…? Did they already give up on this game or what?
Yes, this was one of the side effects of recreating the multiplayer through Halo: Reach. 343 Industries initially had four to six different hoppers for this game, but as Halo: Reach started dwindling in its player count, so did Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (hint: most Anniversary Slayer players play Halo: Reach and not Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary). I imagine if they genuinely recreated the original multiplayer, it would have a slightly bigger handful of playlists, but it would certainly be more populated than the one playlist alone.
> So why is there only one playlist for the multiplayer besides firefight…? Did they already give up on this game or what?
There were originally five playlists.
Anniversary Classic
Anniversary Squad
Anniversary FFA
Anniversary BTB
Anniversary Firefight
In a certain update, they removed all Anniversary gametypes from Anniversary Squad so it was just TU settings (85% bloom, armour lock nerf, etc). After a month or so, this playlist was removed eventually.
Then when August 2012 rolled around, they consolidated a lot of the playlists to ensure that once Halo 4 came out and the population for Reach dropped that players would still find games at a decent time, so they decided to remove playlists which had low player counts. Two of those were Anniversary FFA (it was rare it hit over 100+ players at peak times) and Anniversary BTB.
That leaves us with Anniversary Classic and Anniversary Firefight.
There are no plans to update Reach that will bring playlists back, only plans for another consolidation which will remove more playlists.