Halo’s online population is struggling. Halo 5 was not well received by a large portion of the old Halo fans, and MCC on Xbox was a disaster, causing a lot of fans to leave and never give it a chance again (for some reason I have frequent connectivity issues on Xbox to this day, might just be my Day One Xbox One). Now that MCC is on PC, it seems that it finally functions quite well, but the population is pretty small already, I think this is because the people who bought it on Xbox years ago got burned, so they aren’t giving it a chance, and most PC players just aren’t as interested in Halo.
Making your product easy to obtain and use is critical to it’s success. If you make it difficult to pick up and use, people are going to give up and move on quickly. Ease of use is why Amazon started in a garage, and is now slowly taking over the world. MCC was genius, but executed poorly, the amount of money lost by this failure is absurd, but it can still be saved.
Halo: Infinite is on the horizon. Any new Halo title still makes a lot of noise and gets attention. Old and new gamers will at least be taking a look at what’s going on with Halo when it comes out. So here’s our chance.
Let’s put MCC on steroids. Integrate all Halo titles into one comprehensive UI, so that changing between Halo titles is seamless and simple. Add in the ability to purchase any Halo title quickly and easily from this same UI, and tons more players will buy the old games. If you have 6 friends who frequently play Halo Infinite, and 4 of them are constantly ditching the other 2 because they want to play Halo 2 on a whim, those other 2 players are very likely to buy Halo 2.
343, let’s do this. It will help rebuild the brand and unify the fanbase. Not only will it make a ton of money by selling existing titles which will require nothing more than maintenance, but it will build momentum and equity for the Halo brand, and sell countless copies of future Halo titles.