I have to say how many new generations of Halo fans are there actually? It doesn’t seem like there are many. While Halo Reach had a decent population, it declined rapidly and didn’t hold a candle to Halo 3’s number, and both Halo 4 and 5 were dead games not long after launch. 343 has never given a hard number on Halo 5’s population, you find in other games they do that frequently Destiny, Rainbow Six Siege, Call of Duty, Overwatch, Sea of Thieves, Rocket League if it’s performing well and growing. Or they have a population counter/tracker online or in-game for anybody to see, 343 completely took the in-game and online population counter away. The classic vs advance movement controversy has been debated to death and is redundant and has been for a long time, everything that needed to be said has already been said.
Moreover, while people bring a lot of good points for how sprint, advance movement, and chasing trends negatively impact Halo, it’s still a subjective topic, like art a painting might be beautiful to one person and ugly to another. Along with being highly unlikely to convince anyone that sprint or advance movement is adverse to Halo if their first contact with Halo is either H4 or H5, and sometimes even Reach, no matter how well-argued. And notably even harder if it’s someone who is from the outside looking in and has had little interaction with Halo or none at all, the issue comes across silly and bizarre, not to mention, it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around it or adequately explain if they aren’t already well versed with the issue. I’ve been with debating, reading posts, and watch videos about this since 2013, and even I find trouble at times trying to get the point across or organize the information in a way that’s easy to come across.
So, if I’m having problems, I certainly know your average Youtuber, a journalist for a publication, and writer for a website absolutely will too and deem the topic not worth the effort, thus drastically limiting its exposure. Also, let’s face it even your not so average Youtuber won’t pick it up either, I’m sure people in this thread know the video by Chris Ray Gun which I’m sure is expertly explained, haven’t watched it, but that the video is 27 minutes long. How long do you think that video took him to make, though? He probably had to do tons of research, organize his points, put some stuff in, take some out, prepare a script, edit the script, edit the video, and a bunch of other things due to how many elements there’re to the sprint and advance movement controversy. On top of that, people’s attention spans today are incredibly short, shorter than a goldfish; most people will not sit through a 27-minute video. If they did, who’s to say they even understood everything said? Our brain spends a lot of effort compressing complex ideas into words, and there’s a lot of information loss that occurs when trying to explain it, furthermore when explaining to somebody who is trying to interpret it and, at best, getting an incomplete understanding.
Consequently, this makes it much harder to not only garner support from people outside the fanbase as well as within but unintentionally trivializes the problem and prevents other people from seeing the bigger picture, which is Halo’s declining and withering popularity, that has arguably been on its last legs for a while now. For instance, just look at the comment section for a streamer negatively reacting to sprint in Halo.
Mindshare should have switched long ago to something more concrete and fact-based like low online population, far fewer montages being made, far lower viewership for tournaments, once active Halo forums now barren or defunct, esports organizations dropping Halo from the circuit, barely any coverage of Halo on gaming websites, Halo Youtube channels just scraping by, the fact that Halo isn’t popular among content creators, etc. Something that’s it easy to cover, easy to understand, easy to make sensational, and easy to make its way in a shareholders meeting or a table of executives at Microsoft who see their flagship gaming franchise isn’t making much money as it uses to or isn’t getting the mainstream love that it always seemed to have and will make less in the foreseeable future if changes aren’t forcefully made or corrected. Then, on the other hand, they could be like, hey, if these changes are made, the franchise will grow and exponentially makes us more money as time goes on.