I actually wager that you are right it wasn’t going to be a live service game.
I’ve had the theory that the game was never intended to have a F2P multiplayer or be split from the campaign. It’s why the campaign was still sold for $60 even though it had no business being full price. People were expecting a campaign and they frankly couldn’t scrap it.
My theory was that they clearly knew the game was a -Yoink!- show and knew that the multiplayer was in a bad state. They likely went F2P for multiplayer to both try and grab more players desperately, and lessen the blow of an unfinished very incomplete product. And well plenty of F2P defenders bought that bait.
Yup, honestly with Elder Ring coming soon, and being that’s it’s full open world full player customization without the paywall as it’s loot you aqauired in game through gameplay… I wonder if that’s going to drag more players away.
Hell I’m going to play it and more of FPS player. I had to pay for the game but somfar it seems.vast open and full of content that dwarfs Halos Campaign.
So far It seems the next major content won’t be until May… That’s like three months for this game.to basically take out Halo.
343 really needs to get their stuff together quick because other games will release and if it offers actually content well Halo I finite will just become another play it when you have a little spare time for a round or two and bounce
I would assume that you look at the player population at a single timepoint which is quite rarely fully representative of the actual player population for the game. For Halo Infinite, the population has recently been quite stable and varies between 4-15k players throughout the game. A similar trend with clear peaks and valleys can also be seen for MCC which has a population that varies between 2-5k players throughout the game or most of the Battlefield games (with Battlefield 2042 as an exception to this rule).
Here are a list of the monthly average population for some games in accordance to Steam charts.
That’s actually misleading. If you had bothered to actually look at Steam Charts you would actually see that lowest drop in population is actually:
Halo Infinite - 3978
Halo MCC - 2k roughly but sometimes dips below.
Battlefield 2042 - 1500 roughly
GTA5 average lowest -53k-64k roughly
Of course I’m going to look at specific times because for certain regions games can feel pretty dead because not everyone lives in America.
There average drops at specific times of day and even then the peak times for Halo Infinite is 14k roughly and that’s still pretty low and still a major drop coming from a game that had 272k roughly barely a few months ago. It may seem stable on the graph but the thing it’s not and is slowly going down and I seriously doubt it’s going go up much anytime soon unless 343i bring a major content update.
At the moment it’s basically like a bottle that is leaking and occasionally someone tries to keep pouring a bit more in.
We shouldn’t expext that the day one or early day player population should remain for a so long time period.
In addition to this, it should also be noted that it isn’t uncommon to see a population curve with clear peak and valley throughout the day. These differences are unfortunately relatively difficult to avoid and are usually caused cultural, economic and population differences around the world.
I think Elden Ring will pull some players away but how many is pure speculation on our part. Elden Ring is not like Halo at all. I will be playing it and I’m waiting for my copy to arrive.
I enjoy 3rd person action / rpg / hack and slash type games, and I have Xbox friends that don’t, in fact I have a cousin that won’t play Gears of War because it’s not fps.
I agree with you about 343i. They do need to get it sorted because there are many other games coming. I will be getting Horizon FW at some point, I only passed because Elden Ring is due.
I expect many rpg fans faced the same issue with time. Halo changed too much for me, 343i have taken a route I won’t support, but that’s on how I feel. Hopefully the give me a reason to come back in the future.
I’m an FPS player…I don’t have much time to play games so when I do I want to BOOM HEADSHOT! I haven’t played a 3rd person RPG style game for years but with the state of Halo Infinite I’ve decided to buy Elden Ring and put my spare time in to that. I don’t tend to play games during the summer months at all so that game should get me through until then and next up will be CODMW2…343i have a small window to get this game fixed for people like me that want to play the game but won’t wait around forever.
Once again misleading. It is uncommon for a AAA game to drop this population this fast this close to launch. 99% of the population on Steam is gone and there is literally no guarantee whatsoever that’ll ever regain a decent amount of that population back. And to make it worse this game needs that high population or it won’t make it to their ‘10 year plan’.
No…things like this could have been avoided but 343i refused to delay the game further and actually lied about the progression system. 343i’s actions is what hurt the ‘official’ launch…just like what’s currently happening with BF2042. Fans don’t always just tolerate it for the sake of it and many have had enough. This isn’t just about casuals anymore. I seriously doubt a majority of the fanbase are casual gamers and a lot of Halo veterans including myself can’t even be bothered to launch the game anymore.
I haven’t seen any data that indicates that Halo Infinite has lost 99% of its active Steam player population since launch. The peak population has been 256,619 players at a single timepoint and 1% of this is 2,566 players. On the other hand, the Steam player population has consistently been above that with few minor exceptions. If we look at the 24 hour peak population for Halo Infinite, it’s 21,235 players which is in fact is in fact around 8.3% of the overall peak population and much higher than 1% of the peak.
Are you seriously joking? 272k vs 3k. Seriously do the maths! It’s basically 99% gone on Steam.
No the peak was 272k and I know because I was looking at it when it was live months ago.
Yeh Steam Charts is currently claiming 256k but that wasn’t what it was saying before and even then that’s still a majority of the player base gone within barely 2-3 months. Why would anyone defend 4k? that’s like peanuts compared to what Halo should have regularly and it’s dropping constantly all the time.
