Read this carefully, and think about it carefully.
HaloCharts tells you Halo 4’s peak War Games: Matchmaking population.
But in Halo 3(before Halo: Reach’s launch, after Reach launched it started using a 24 hour UU counter) and Halo: Reach tells you how many players are currently online (it DID not matter what they were playing, Forge, Custom Games, Campaign, Theater, CUSTOM Firefight, sitting in lobbies, sitting at the main menu, searching for a matchmaking game, it still counted for Halo 3 and Reach, Unlike Halo 4)
I know what you are thinking. “I doubt anyone isn’t really playing anything other than Matchmaking”, this isn’t true, infact for most games (even Halo, and gasp even Black Ops), only 30-60% of the population would play Multiplayer MATCHMAKING at any given time for pretty much any game with Matchmaking in it.
Example: I went on Halo: Reach online, I went to the Matchmaking lobby, I saw 18,000 players online, I went to the PLAYLISTS in the Matchmaking lobby, and added all the matchmaking playlists numbers up for Halo: Reach, and it equaled 9,000. So yesterday, there was 18k players on Halo: Reach, but there were only 9k playing MATCHMAKING at the time.
So 50% of Halo: Reach’s population was playing Matchmaking, and that WAS YESTERDAY. And back in Halo: Reach’s prime, when I saw 100k online in Halo: Reach, I would count all the playlist numbers and it equaled 50,000 players in MATCHMAKING for Halo: Reach, and 100,000 players online. So that was 50%.
I went on Black Ops 2, a week ago, saw 500k in Multiplayer, and 150k in Zombies, and went to Multiplayer Playlists, and counted all the numbers and there were 250k in Multiplayer Matchmaking at the time. So that’s 50% of Black Ops 2 Multiplayer population playing Matchmaking Multiplayer.
So if you see 65k on Halo 4’s War Games Matchmaking, there are probably, 100,000-135,000 players online on Halo 4, but only 65k only playing on War Games Matchmaking. Too bad, Halo 4 doesn’t tell you how many total players are online(it only tells you it’s Matchmaking populatio). While Halo 3 and Halo: Reach did tell you how many players are online, and it didn’t matter what the people were playing in Halo 3/Reach it still counted to the population counter.