As a live service, there’s no doubt about it that Halo Infinite has been underperforming. Not just for us as consumers, but most likely for the MS investors as well. There is no data to show us how much revenue has been generated from the store, but it’s safe to say that that number is heavily correlated to the number of total active players. I highly doubt that Halo Infinite managed to meet investor expectations in regard to its free to play multiplayer, considering the fact that the numbers are abysmal for a free to play title.
So, how would MS explain this at their earnings call? My bet is that they’re going to pin all of this on an industry-wide “development fatigue” and use BF2042’s disaster to corroborate their claim. Internal mismanagement will obviously be swept under the rug. If the Halo TV show bombs on top of this, investors might lose interest in the Halo IP altogether. The possibility of MS shelving everything Halo related for a very long time, could be more likely than ever.
I don’t know, they probably got a pretty high percentage to buy the battlepass, and given how it was easy to shell out more money in the first few weeks than a normal game would cost (+the campaign still being full price) likely still made them a healthy amount of money.
Just because population is low now, doesn’t mean people didn’t fork out cash at the start.
The game is still being worked on meaning development costs will continue to add up.
THOUGH the game made a boat load of monies at the start if Season 2 and they keep doubling down it could end up being a catastrophic loss.
Realistically, If Season 2 launches with only two maps the entire season it’ll end up being a loss for 343i/MS. If forge is a massive success it could cut the loss from Season 2 but it’s clear if things end up going the way Season 1 went it’s over for 343i.
It’s likely Certain Infinity will carry 343i out of this at some point.
You sure? What is it that you think were the internal business goals that were not met?
My guess is that they know Halo has a pretty solid core fan base of X number of players and that Y% of those players will engage financially at $Z per quarter. I would not be surprised if the suits accurately estimated that revenue goal and met it. Anything more is bonus.
Yes, but no. Total players for sure can increase revuneue. But I’d imagine they were banking on a more-or-less garunteed benchmark based on the percentage of more dedicated Halo players who are likely to spend money.
Depends on how realistic investor expectations have been. And how consistently the core base keeps returning for each event/season.
I’m not business savvy in the least, but I’d assume all Halo needs to do is ROI, and there are two ways to balance that equation. And with such a tenured franchise, knowing where the numbers will fall should be nearly a guarantee.
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So I paid $10 but that will be the only money I ever spend on the game for the foreseeable future because nothing in the shop interests me or is a good enough price to justify buying it.
It also doesn’t help that this game won’t last much longer with most games dying out within a year unless they’re new CODs so why would I drop $50 on the store like the whales if nobody’s going to see it lol.
I’m gonna say the average amount of money spent per player is about $16 per P2Player, then subtract from the official figure of 20M players and use every time I’ve seen paid cosmetics in my 300 something matches ingame, on Youtube, and Twitch. I’ll also use current player stats from Steam which are less than 10k and an unofficial number from the Xbox most played.
So I’ll say that there’s 1.7M players who’ve spent money and assume a third of them bought items in the shop so 400,000 with an average of $25 spent. So we got $10M right here, next I’ll add the 1.3M like me who only bought the battlepass, so $1,300,000, and we add that and we have only $11,300,000.
So only $11.3M in the first 5 months of the game coming out when according to a German video game journalist Microsoft had a budget of over $500M for Halo Infinite. Even if my math is off ,which it probably is, there’s no way they could even recuperate their money let alone make a profit off of it.
COD Warzone and Fortnite were the 2 top grossing games made in recent years but they both combined didn’t have nearly as big of a budget as the supposed one Infinite had. Yet they both have made billions of dollars and revolutionized the video game industry.
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They have so many fingers in so many pies, it’s not a huge deal for them even if it is underperforming financially. But I wouldn’t be so sure that it is.
Despite the complaints, people seem to keep buying the mtx cosmetics, and I imagine they sold quite a few battlepasses before the population fell off. Campaign sales are probably pretty low, but they would have known about that going in. The whole point of putting it on game pass was to trade the short term profits to help market the game pass subscriptions, a long term profit model that looks far better to most investors than just another short term gain.
Also, moneysoft owns cod now, so it’s not like they wont be raking in tons of money from shooter players. That’s definitely bigger news for their investors than Halo underperforming a bit more, it’s been doing that for over a decade at this point.