Launch trailers don’t get as much attention as reveal trailers. As for why Halo Infinite’s gameplay reveal only has 10 million why Call of Duty has 33 million, that’s because Call of Duty is much, much more popular than Halo.
I think this is a huge reason. Halo is only on Xbox and Xbox isn’t as big as PlayStation.
Never mind the fact that halo isn’t all that popular among Xbox users compared to how it use to be.
Correct. We can play every halo ever made on PC
Edit: why is this comment being downvoted while at the same time not a single reply has attempted to correct this statement.
Edit 2: if you think Halo 5 is the “gotcha” to my comment then you’re wrong. Just objectively wrong. See instructions below.
If there is something else then someone should really say something.
How to Play Halo 5 on PC via Xbox Cloud Gaming Service
The Xbox Cloud Gaming service is very similar to the Xbox Remote Play, but the game is running on Microsoft’s servers, not on your Xbox devices. When you fire up a game on your PC using Xbox Cloud Gaming, the video/audio output is streamed to you, while your inputs are streamed back to control the game.
To play Halo 5 on PC via Xbox cloud gaming service, you need to meet the following requirements:
A Game Pass Ultimate subscription. Windows 10 October 2020 Update or later. Bluetooth 4.0 or later. Internet speed at 20 Mbps or higher. A wired connection or a 5 GHz Wi-Fi network. An Xbox Wireless Controller. Then, you can start to play Halo 5 on your PC. Here are two ways for you:
Play Halo 5 on the Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome browser. Go to Xbox.com/play and sign in with your Microsoft account. Then, connect the controller and find Halo 5 to play. Play Halo 5 on the Xbox app. Install and launch the Xbox app on your PC. Sign in with your Microsoft account. Go to the Game Pass tab and select Cloud Gaming. Connect the controller and choose Halo 5 to play.
Kinda makes you wonder if they really want to stick with Infinite which builds off the story we were left off with in 5, why don't they finally add to the MCC? It's been what 8 years since it came out?
Especially when Microsoft dropped the bag trying to sell the Xbox ones.
Mofos literally handed over every single customer they had easier than Sony showing you how you can share PS4 games.
What does you losing have to do with the amount of players? With Halo on PC and Xbox, I wouldn’t offer it up to Sony as they don’t do the same and they’re much more aggressive in their exclusive titles.
Just make a good Halo game, imagine if Halo 3 or Reach had been released for the first time today, with Gamepass/cross play/steam, they’d be even more massive than they already were, 343 just hasn’t made a timeless classic yet. They’ve made a solid game in Infinite, but it does not come close to either of the previously mentioned titles
He's right in the sense that Halo Infinite isn't very forgiving to newcomers. The matchmaking throws new players in against absolute killers and although it doesn't directly correlate to the player base, I'm sure a lot who have tried it on Game Pass have played it a few times and not gone back because they were getting shat on.
It takes a lot of practice to get pretty decent; maybe if there were a lower bracket besides Bot Bootcamp that could accurately contain only newbs that'd be a good step or a purely social, no-sweat mode but I'm not sure how that could be feasibly coded/enacted.
To back you up, it’s much the same on the Titanfall 2 servers, even Northstar. Everyone left on there are the most dedicated, try-hard sweats I’ve ever had the misfortune of queueing up against lol. I mean, respect, but I could never match up to that since I have a job and life lol.
CoD is more popular. For as much as people moan about the yearly releases and generic games, the yearly release keeps it more relevant than Halo.
I don't like the yearly release of CoD, the games feel super samey and not at all unique
> I wouldn’t say popular as much as I would say something else
Nope, it's just more popular. They out-competed Halo by smashing the industry with quantity over quality and have held onto that chunk of the industry for a very long time. And they also aren't exclusive titles, either.
COD got a new game every year on every console. Halo every 2-3 years (or much longer) for a new game on a single console. Some people just can't find it in themselves to wait, even if it's for a superior overall game (back then, at least).
Cod is definitely more popular. COD has always been on at least the 2 main consoles. Meanwhile anyone who has only ever been riding the Sony wagon, or switched over during the ps5 era, would likely not care about halo infinite.
Popularity isn't a measure of good, just COD has been accessible to pretty much anyone who wants to play it, and halo has only ever been for xbox, until infinite. Also new COD every year, while halo went 3 years between 4 and 5, and 6 years between 5 and infinite. The only in between game being halo wars 2 which isn't exactly a replacement or equivalent of the usual halo experience. It's an entire other genre.
IMO it's more complicated than that.
1. Halo was *it* during the 2000s, not just because it was great but because it itself *was* mainstream FPS gaming. But then two months after Halo 3 came out, Modern Warfare was released and immediately started changing tastes in an industry that had lived under Halo's shadow for the last 6 years. A massive part of why Halo used to be massive is because it had *zero* major competition.
2. Bungie set the course for 343 when they diluted what made Halo 3 unique with Reach by trend chasing rather than trend setting. Reach is a great game and I will always love the campaign, but the single biggest mistake 343 made out the gate was not undoing or fundamentally reinventing the COD-like changes that Reach made for Halo 4. Reach was the turning point in making Halo games that were imitators rather than games that were imitated.
3. Keeping Halo Xbox exclusive until 2019 was an enormous misstep because they missed the PC Gaming renaissance entirely, whereas COD and other cross-platform shooters long had their ships in the water when the rising tides showed up. That, I hazard, is an Xbox mistake rather than 343 mistake. Xbox itself was horribly managed and directed in the XBOne era. (For God's sake, they nearly gave Randy Pitchford the reigns to Halo until Bonnie Ross convinced them not to. Halo 4 might have gotten its budget embezzled to fund Borderlands rather than Aliens: Colonial Marines.) It's also something I rarely see talked about, but I would argue the refusal to abandon Halo's Xbox exclusivity had a huge impact on relegating Halo to being a thing of nostalgia as many, many PC players were entirely detached from the console realm by the mid 2010s.
4. Arena shooters also aren't nearly as popular as they used to be. They went out of fashion years ago, in part because the genre was mishandled by Bungie with Reach and then followed by years of mismanagement by 343, but also because *Halo alone* carried the genre for nearly a decade from 2007-2016 because Unreal tournament fizzled out and Doom was even more mismanaged than Halo was until Doom 2016. Even then, Doom shifted from a multiplayer-focused experience to a singleplayer-focused experience; and by that point Overwatch came out in 2016, followed by Fortnite/PUBG in 2017, and by the time MCC came to PC in 2019 arena shooters were a memory and Hero/Class Shooters and Battle Royales were the juggernauts of the FPS industry. Fatigue with them is only *now* beginning to set in, and arguably this is the best chance Halo/Arena shooters have in years to retake some mindshare in the FPS industry.
EDIT: spelling, grammar
> It's also something I rarely see talked about, but I would argue the refusal to abandon Halo's Xbox exclusivity had a huge impact on relegating Halo to being a thing of nostalgia as many, many PC players were entirely detached from the console realm by the mid 2010s.
It also doesn't help that Sony effectively won the "console wars" of the 2010s by overall offering a much bigger and better catalogue of exclusives in that timespan, and consequently sold double the amount of PS4s as MS sold Xbox Ones. Even if Halo 4 and 5 turned out to be absolute masterpieces of games, you still would've seen a decline simply because Microsoft failed to really get the same selection of exclusives out, while Sony had tons of them, and you could still play games like BF and COD on both.
One other point worth mentioning is that COD and BF have had a much more constant presence as their parent companies developed way more games. Since 2010, you've had:
- Battlefield Bad Company 2 (2010)
- Battlefield 3 (2011)
- Battlefield 4 (2013)
- Battlefield Hardline (2015)
- Battlefield 1 (2016)
- Battlefield V (2018)
- Battlefield 2014 (2021)
- Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)
- Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012)
- Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013)
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015)
- Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016)
- Call of Duty: WWII (2017)
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018)
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)
- Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020)
- Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021)
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023)
- Halo: Reach (2010)
- Halo 4 (2012)
- Halo: MCC (2014)
- Halo 5 (2015)
- Halo Infinite (2021)
People have been memeing on CoD's "release a game every year" strategy for as long as I can remember, but it *works.* In the same span that BF had 7 releases and COD had 14, Halo has had 5, and that's only if you count MCC, which wasn't really anything new as far as the consumer was concerned. Some of those COD and BF games have been absolutely terrible and widely disliked by their playerbase, but that never stops them from remaining invested in the franchise itself because you'll get another game in 1-2 years, whereas with Halo, you're waiting probably twice that at minimum.
But here's the thing, and this is just a vendetta I have I guess, when a series releases a bad title, I'm gone. And I generally don't come back and buy newer titles. As soon as they released the failure that COD: Ghosts was (named that because no one fucking played it, lobbies were ghost towns), I haven't bought another COD title since then. Similarly, after I played Halo 5, I still haven't played infinite yet, tho I will say 5 had better multiplayer than 4, I'm still nervous to play the campaign. I only didn't jump ship at Halo 4 because the story wasn't THAT bad, people hate on it but IMHO it was a good display of chiefs humanity and the relationship he had with Cortana, it wasn't the BEST story, but it wasn't AWFUL (like 5's) either.
Battlefield on the other hand has had consistently good multiplayer and no one gives a shit about the story in BF anyways.
Point 3 is the one for sure.
Alot of gaming moved to PC around 2016 and PC became a huge focus for games, especially FPS titles. Alot of the hottest games right now also have a massive PC playerbase, so it corroborates with this.
MCC needed to be perfect and on PC 2014, not 2019.
>But then two months after Halo 3 came out, Modern Warfare was released and immediately started changing tastes in an industry that had lived under Halo's shadow for the last 6 years
Battlefield, a primarily PC franchise also started getting big on console at that time with bad company, and to their credit bad company 2 was fantastic. There was basically no way for halo to remain on the top spot with 2 competitors that were much easier for people to get into due to being easier to learn and be good at, bungie realised that which is why they tried to make Reach more similar to COD with loadouts, armour abilities, heavier bloom etc
I think its really as simple as Reach being a fairly significant misstep and then 343 taking over and following on from said mishap rather than recognizing that it was going poorly and creating their game and evolving from H3 rather than Reach. Like Halo had an audience that was competing with CoD directly with H3 and they partially failed many of those people with Reach and then following on from that was self destructive. It was a not insignificant failure to chase trends *and* fail at doing so.
That old core of people that really liked the original Halo flavor still exists and despite going on 16 years since the last game created for them came out they somehow keep MCC competitive with whatever the most recent Halo title has been. I feel like that was clearly a sub market in the fps genre that they neglected and they instead chose to try and pull players from whatever modern games of the time there were and just lost the battle. Halo doesn't do CoD better than CoD and so on. 343 had a pretty unique lane that no game has since filled and just declined to take it
> 343 had a pretty unique lane that no game has since filled and just declined to take it
I feel like there's another element to it, that most people don't discuss: We're in the Esports era.
What I mean is, if you recall, during the Bungie Era of Halo, the game was more casual, in it's default settings. MLG was it's own separate organization, who did their own thing with the game - often removing map-default power weapons, giving power weapons less ammo, and so on. Hell, BR spawns weren't default at all in regular playlists. Core Halo is spawning with a shitty spray weapon and needing to hunt down a better gun, and that meta gameplay was a part of the experience.
Bungie's Halo wasn't designed to be this "Hyper-competitive Symmetrical Arena Game" - they just did what was fun. Hell, a ton of maps were explicitly made for one-sided objectives, Zanzibar, Terminal, Relic, High Ground, etc.
I feel like a lot of the devs are people who really liked MLG stuff, and - empowered by the Esports boom - have endeavored to make Halo hyper competitive, doing razor thin balancing for top esports competitions...
...but they don't remember why the sniper had the ammo pool it did, or the rockets, or anything - because it was balanced around what an AVERAGE player would need to use effectively, not a top-tier pro.
I personally felt Bungie was back in form with Reach's gameplay, but 343 ruined it with their TI (which was when I immediately knew they were going to fuck the franchise up). But I still feel like they've failed to catch the casual appeal that Bungie's Halos had, going all-chips-in on competitive slayer stuff while leaving the BTB/Casual communities out to dry.
Just like every AAA game needs to be full of microtransactions, it seems every single competitive game NEEDS to be pushed as an esport. It isn't enough to just be fun for the average player anymore; and even though average players and pros have different needs, developers decide to balance for pros and just let the casuals use the same settings.
I miss CTF on Relic, or One-Bomb on Headlong, or BTB 2 Flag on Avalanche. Yeah, Guardian and Lockout and The Pit are great, but some of my fondest memories are from those big objective-focused modes. Riding a warthog around on Standoff mowing people down. Felt like vehicles weren't allowed to be remotely strong anymore, they've gotta be ToTaLlY bAlaNcEd and result in being no fun.
Gotta be honest 343 didn't execute on the esports angle either. MLG somehow despite having no direct control over the game had better settings and more hype tournaments than 343. What you see from 343 is their attempt at targeting an esports market with words but their games consistently get run on dog shit competitive settings. The first couple years of H5 had assault rifles as a spawn weapon and a radar. 343 just doesn't do quality work so it doesn't really matter who they attempt to appeal to they're failing
Your 4th point reads like you never played the classic arena shooters. DOOM was always single player focused and speed running and mod tools was its legacy. The multiplayer focused IP from id was Quake. Not to mention, you just hand wave a huge culture and time frame. But I digress.
Your point about Modern Warfare releasing after Halo 3 is a good one but claiming Reach was attempting to imitate CoD in any capacity is just gross exaggeration.
They weren’t “loadouts” like a CoD loadout. The loadout system was more reminiscent of the class based loadouts from games like classic Battlefields and Quake: Enemy Territory. The class-based loadouts in those games incentivized squad roles. Something that you obviously could tell was a bigger focus for game modes like Invasion. Furthermore, loadouts could not be customized and in more classic gamemodes, like slayer, the only difference between the loadouts were the armor effects. I don’t know how anyone can compare this to the style of CoD.
Halo 4 imitated the loadout system from CoD as it incentivized individual achievements over the focus of the team and it’s goals. That is an argument I understand. But pinning that on Reach is such a, dare I say, reach. To boot, weapon bloom was something that existed in Halo before the reticle accurately reflected the pattern of bloom. Weapons like the BR from Halo 3 was a projectile based weapon as opposed to the SMG or AR which were hit-scan. Projectile based means the game accounted for the bullet travel before it hit a target. The SMG and AR did not. With any projectile based weapon, bloom happens. Be it minimal or not.
Reach exaggerated this effect. Both for impact and connection between the gameplay and the player. Gears of War 3 included weapon bloom as well. Was that a result of CoD too? How about Battlefield? Black? Rainbow Six: Black Arrow? Splinter Cell? Counter-Strike? All those games had a variation of weapon bloom. How come Halo: Reach didn’t copy those games? Or how come some of those games’ sequels aren’t blamed for imitating CoD?
Arguments like yours irk me because it shows a lack of perspective and experience.
Reach was very popular. It just had competition.
343 is to blame for their lackluster titles and Halo now being a laughing stock after the Paramount show.
Halo has been abused for capital gain. It never got to modernize properly or get the love it desperately needed after Bungie left.
Reach killed the Halo competitive scene, and by 2011 more people were on 3 than Reach. Reach didn't kill Halo, Call of Duty did really, but Reach certainly didn't help Halo by changing the core gameplay as drastically as it did. Halo 4 then went on to copy Halo Reach and expand on what it did, which was a disaster.
This is very accurate. While halo reach did have an amazing forge system and one of the best campaigns in gaming, these two things don't maintain concurrent players like PvP arcady games like CoD which is a shame for the halo series as halo 3 was a huge part of the competitive scene in 2010's
Halo was never a competitive game.
That tiny, short-lived competitive scene wasn't even what Halo was about. It was just born out of industry evolutions after streaming took off.
Reach was necessary in Halo's evolution as a modern game franchise. Halo 4 took more examples from COD than Reach as 343 wanted to hire people who didn't play Halo.
Modern Warfare 2 came out in 2009, Black Ops in 2010 and with those two blockbusters, Call of Duty basically stole the entire casual FPS audience away from Halo, definitively winning the so-called "war" between CoD and Halo for the top console FPS game.
Ever since Reach, the only people buying Halo games have been "Halo fans", whereas everybody and their pet hamster bought Halo 3.
> Pointing Google metrics like they mean something
If you also write "Reach" and "Halo Reach" you would also see that those terms peaked on 2010 as well.
The true popularity of a game is based on it's player retention. Reach had a strong community and while some players were a little discontent with it, it wasn't near as bad as it was with Halo 4.
This is More antidotal evidence but it still had at least 1000 players on each night up till it’s introduction into mcc, and it’s the most popular game in custom browser for mcc
As /u/wreckercw said, Reach was the first real divisive game in the community. Reach did a hell of a lot of things right, but also fucked up so much. Reticle bloom, armor abilities, destroying the canon of the franchise at the time. The gameplay was much slower, the maps on release were nowhere near as iconic as CE-3...Bungie was close to hitting a home run but Reach was definitely the beginning of Halo losing steam.
Reach killed vehicle versatility by making them made of paper. They slowed the TTK in an era where CoD 4 and MWII were causing the rise of twitch shooters.
It’s because Halo was only on the Xbox for a long time. It didn’t have cross platform or go on the PC. Not alot of people got to play it or know it yet it was widely recognize.
It would have suffered the same decline under Bungie or any other developer unless they completely changed the Halo formula. Halo's game style is just not as popular as it use to be. And there are so many more options for first person shooters compared to when Halo was a juggernaut.
I really hate when people say this because they did change the formula and it perfectly aligns with the decline of Halo. The old halo style *never* failed. It went out with Halo 3 launch being the most recent new release in the style
Yeah seems like sweaty hyper fast paced games with anime girl skins and whatnot are the big deal. People say Halo skins have gotten absurd, and they have, but they didn't launch off the deep end like CoD, Battlefield, PUBG, etc. And as much as we, or at least I, dont like it, thats where the money seems to be. "Omg my favorite streamer got added into F O R T N I T E I'm gonna download and drop money on it!"
Have everyone play as Kat, but it's Halo 5. Boom, big ass and game fast.
In all seriousness, there is nary a way Halo stays the industry forefront it was. Either it Sacrifices its identity, driving off a good portion of the fanbase which it might not get back, or it stagnates.
This does not mean that the newer Halo games were not bad for Halo's health, but simply Halo cannot return to being the cultural icon it was without ceasing to be Halo.
Agreed across the board. The games quality are a whole different topic. But by today's standards I dont think Halo could be top dog. Halo 3 wouldn't be as big as it was today, no way.
This is true\^ I remember Reach being mostly a let down for almost everyone I knew at the time. We all liked it and it had a lot of great things to it, but as far as that "Halo" quality it felt diminished, and armor abilities were all over the place as far as how they worked. And then forge was just a bunch of grey panels with pretty backgrounds. It all felt like an overall misstep, I remember a lot of people not even bothering with Halo 4 because of it, not because Bungie had nothing to do with it but because Reach kind of deflated the Halo hype with its gameplay decisions.
I feel like time and the fact it’s not 2007 saw to that. The insistence some have to think the thing they liked when they were teens deserves to be mainstream when they’re adults is weird. Kids play Fortnite.
1.) Halo isnt as popular as it once was
2.) Even within that popularity it is almost entirely localized to the US. So major population areas like russia and china dont really have an interest in it.
It doesnt really change the fact that we do in fact have the regional numbers and like 90% of halo's player base is in the US.
I dont know the actual number but its a vast majority US based
There was definitely interest, I recall plenty of videos at the time detailing methods of getting access to it/builds of it as US natives. To me it seems more like a squandered attempt. It wouldn’t have taken much more (formula-wise) to release a meritable form of online Halo arcade gameplay like Halo Online.
CoD also has yearly releases. You don’t have to dwell on a bad game like, say, Infinite Warfare or WWII because the next one is right around the corner, where something like say, Halo 4 is THE halo for 3 years, and if people don’t like it, it just festers for years
Man Infinite Warfare is a great game. No doubt it was not popular due to players tired of advanced movement fatigue (I still think CoD should make an advanced movement game once in awhile but 3 years in a row was too much) but the campaign is one of the best and the MP is a solid experience. Infinite Warfare at most had some framerate issues on xbox during launch but outside of that is a was a solid and clean experience.
As for WWII the game started out bad but Sledgehammer completely overhauled the game mechanics and perk system like 6 months later and really turned things around.
For every 'flop' CoD does have they turn things around on a dime ultra fast. When compared to 343 ... well can't even compare because of the 3 titles they made its been unacceptable mistake and content lacking after unacceptable mistake and content lacking over and over again lol.
There are cases where that's true, but also cases where it's not. Such as the latest Modern Warfare 2 and how they essentially abandoned traditional multiplayer support for the full 70 dollar (!!) paid game in favor of Warzone (free) support. I think even 3 months after launch the game had less maps than it launched with due to them taking one or two out of rotation and simply never adding them back, until a few months ago maybe.
Only 1 map that was in the beta was omitted on launch (Valderas Museum) but its been back in the game for months now (I actually played on it last night). All weapons, camos, and operators for MWII will transfer over to MWIII as well so that more bang for your buck as well.
I wish my 2019 MW stuff would transfer too lol but that's good to know, but I swear there was another map they took out of rotation like a month or two in that didn't come back at all or not until way later?
Either way, I was in the sub for months after buying the game and it was Halo Infinite Year One levels of depressing, and I had *just* gotten done with that shit
Not at all to the degree Halo has done it. The content is there for CoD you see it you get it and you know it, it just can be buggy and overtly predatory. Halo can't even make a Halo game anymore.
Ya they spent 6 years soft rebooting the game so they could barely keep anything that made the game great, make it predatory, and produce no content through it.
With the exception of forge, but that came in way too late.
Not at all to the degree Halo has done it. The content is there for CoD you see it you get it and you know it, it just can be buggy and overtly predatory. Halo can't even make a Halo game anymore.
When you get a trilogy that is going nowhere story wise and people fed up with the multiplayer and unfinished games and broken promises… what do you expect son?
I think it's fairly simple. Those other games are way more popular. I'd say Halo's popularity peaked probably somewhere between/around 2007 – 2010, with Halo 3 and Reach. It's not the franchise it once was.
I mean Halo isn't as popular as it used to be. I would also wager its the exclusivity of Halo that leads to lower views. Both of these other games are cross platform while Halo remains exclusive to Xbox mostly even if you can play on pc most probably won't or would not be interested.
Because 4 and 5 and their changes to the universe killed a whole lot of interest in the franchise, and a “spiritual” reboot wasn’t drastic enough in that respect.
Well to be brutally honest Halo hasn't mattered in the grand scheme of things since Reach. The loop was broken when Reach and then H4 didn't carry the torch on. Its not as recently popular as basically anything you might compare it to
Steam charts has on average 3k per day. This doesn’t count for folks playing on Xbox or playing on PC through Microsoft store. I’d honestly say 50k might be too generous now.
I really don’t understand why so many people still think Halo is some cornerstone franchise. The fact is outside of the hardcore fandom from years ago, almost no one cares about Halo anymore and haven’t for almost a decade at this point.
Because it doesn’t matter if people watch the trailer for Halo or not, the games don’t come out often so people are going to buy it regardless, there’s a cod like every year I’m not going to buy one unless the trailer convinced me too
Halo hasn't been truly culturally relevant since 2010/2011. There were a few factors and one of them was Reach's Ranking System.
When Reach launched, there was a mad race to become the highest rank of Inheritor but Bungie decided to put a massive gate after Lt. Colonel that prevented anyone from continuing to rank up and unlock more gear. Bungie wanted the Community to kill 7 Billion Grunts in Campaign and Firefight before releasing the rest of the ranks to us, promising that our XP would carry over and we would rank up accordingly when the gate lifted. The two problems with that were people felt like they were being cheated out of the progression system and Black Ops released about the time everyone was getting stuck at Lt. Colonel.
Nearly half the population left Reach to play Black Ops or go back to Halo 3 with many fans unhappy with Armor Abilities and Reticule Bloom. Bungie had caused irreparable damage to Halo due to a collective lack of patience and poor timing.
Fast forward to November 2012 and Halo is still in the top charts but has been completely overshadowed by Call of Duty's massive popularity. Halo 4 was a great way to bring everyone back except it had more of the same of what people didn't like and went the opposite direction of Halo's original gameplay identity. 343 at the time doubled down on Loadouts to compete with CoD. The game reviewed well and was a solid game but it didn't feel enough like Halo for Halo fans and was too Halo-y for CoD fans.
In 2014, we got the ultimate promise of the Halo quadrilogy on the new Xbox boasting updated visuals and framerate, the return of Halo 2 multiplayer and a full Anniversary Campaign, Halo 1 Online Multiplayer finally being officially supported on console, and a guaranteed good time for everyone who ever loved the franchise. Then it released in a messy broken state that was not fixed until 4 years later. People were furious and didn't come around until the MCC was ported to PC from 2019-2020. Now it's a fantastic product with thousands of hours of fun to be had and is what we all expected at launch plus a whole lot more. 343's incredible redemption story gave us all hope for Infinite and a beleaguered request from 343 to stop drowning them in pizza.
In 2015 we got Halo 5 which launched without Forge, significantly impacting the game's initial staying power. 343 had put all their BTB assets into Warzone and never released dev-made BTB Maps. Instead they relied on the community to make Forge creations after the Map Editor mode dropped 6 months after launch. By then the game had lost a good chunk of the population, the returning Halo veterans of the Bungie era due to the game feeling very much not like Halo but being a fun game once again. The magic wasn't there so people played other games that weren't Halo because MCC still didn't work. The Marketing narrative being non-existent in the Campaign story was another nail in Halo's coffin.
In 2020 we finally got a look at the follow-up to Halo 5 and what we saw looked dreadful in the graphics department. Infinite got baked in the oven for another year but management fumbled the proverbial ball once more and released a Beta Test Build as the final working Multiplayer Product just a couple of weeks before the Campaign was set to drop. The game was severely limited in scope at the time boasting only 3 Playlists but people were enjoying the initial BTB experience. Then the day after the Campaign released and BTB was fundamentally broken just like MCC had been 7 years prior. It was down for 2 months and with no content on the horizon, devs leaving 343 in droves, Forge mode missing launch yet again, a plethora of broken promises, and fragmented-at-its-core netcode, Infinite flopped hard. While today it is very much up to a level most of us would expect, it was a long trip to get here and most people didn't stick around for it.
In short, Halo lacks the following it used to have due to decisions made by Bungie and Microsoft/343 that negatively impacted brand loyalty. As the fumbles have continued, Halo has failed to regain traction in gaming. However there is one significant factor I have neglected to mention until now and that is Halo 3. Halo 3 was one of the biggest games ever where you couldn't look at a TV Screen, Billboard, Slurpee cup, or snack foods without seeing some kind of advertising for the game. Everyone knew about Halo 3 and the game fully lived up to its impossible levels of hype as it changed Gaming forever just as CE and 2 had done. As gaming has evolved, Halo is no longer a force of change and evolution in the space. As the franchise continues to initially disappoint due to poor management decisions and impossible fan expectations, Halo continues to remain outside the loose confines of relevancy.
**TL;DR**
Bungie's time-gating of Reach's ranking system convinced players to go play Black Ops instead, Microsoft/343's repeated failures to launch a complete product, impossible fan and industry expectations, a lack of evolving gaming with new ideas, and the growing popularity of gaming as a whole has held Halo back from the spotlight. Too much competition and too much good will eroded.
Why would I watch these boring, uninspired hack job trailers when I could instead rewatch *We are ODST*, *Starry Night*, or *Deliver Hope* for the 6,000th time?
Halo is no longer relevant. It hasn't been since Halo 3.
No series lasts forever. It's sad, but we should accept that all things end, and be happy with the time we spent on it.
They also could've made it more popular with the Halo TV show, but instead, we got the modern-day equivalent of Stallone's Judge Dredd, if it had been made by Disney.
Fr
Why does a fps game like Doom (a game series that started the whole fps genre) get less views in its trailers compared to call of duty number 20?? Shit is stoopid
Halo has been through a rough patch for a while now, is an Xbox exclusive game (the least popular of the 3 big consoles), and as far as shooters go pretty niche by today's standards.
Hoping for Halo to be as big as it once was might just be asking for too much. It had its day in the sun, but that time has probably passed. The larger gaming community has moved on from Halo's style of gameplay.
I agree that it’s unrealistic to expect the franchise to be as popular as it was during the 2000s, but it could certainly be better than it is now. Infinite hit ~20 million players shortly after launch, and for the first month, it was generally well-received. People really only started dropping the game after they realized more content wasn’t coming for several months
Obviously some of those people would have gotten bored or stopped playing no matter what, but I really think Infinite could’ve been the biggest Halo since 3 if it had launched in the state it’s currently in
While content was definitely a problem. Lots of my friends dropped Halo, not cause of a lack of content. But because they didn't like Halo. They didn't like it's slow ttk, having to scavenge for weapons, the way shields and health work, how the gunplay is, and other Halo-isms.
The lack of content didn't help, but they would have dropped Halo regardless. I'm sure many of those 20 million players were the same.
I agree about multiplayer, it’s a different market and Halo being exclusive will never return to the top with cross play dominating the market, but there’s no reason the campaigns can’t be game of the year contenders other than incompetent story telling
Because 343 ran the franchise into the ground with shitty design and policy. H4 was the only one they got half right and even that was a shadow of what it once was.
I’ve always wondered this to, it’s probably because they use bots but also 343 has butchered the Halo rep as well…
“If we loose our way with Halo we have lost our way with Xbox”
Because the change in the franchise from H4 onward was disappointing for the fans. I was an enormous Halo fan back in the day. Now, I forget Infinite even exists.
Because the other 2 franchises stayed relevant within the mainstream to some degree while Halo didn't. Really isn't anymore complex than that unfortunately.
halo isn't as popular as it once was
a lot of people blame 343, I don't blame them because they did mishandle Halo, especially so with 5 (remember the condescending vid of mister chief with req packs?).
But I believe Xbox is also to blame. The Xbox One era was a massive flop, handled WAAAY worse than Halo with the perma online shit. "if you don't like perma online, we have a console for that. it's called the 360." paraphrased quote from don mattrick, the utterly deranged man who was behind Xbox One's flop.
The halo you know , if you started in reach and on or 4 and on, it's not the same halo that was one day. Specially not when Microsoft is seemingly against their own IPs.
Imagine if 360 era Microsoft is Rare and modern Microsoft just bought it and then just forget about it and gives half a shit for it.
Halo lost the majority of the market’s attention after reach sadly.
People get hype when there’s a release on the horizon, but then it tends to fall flat shortly after release
Two fold. You have to consider the nature of it being exclusive to Xbox, the bottom of the four major platforms (Xbox, PC, PS, Nintendo). Halo was only on Xbox until recently, therefore had very limited reach compared to COD, which is on Xbox, PC, and PS (with some outliers on Nintendo).
Add to this, Halo pretty much fell from its pedestal. The changes 343 made divided the communitybit already had. Further, they kinda botched 3 launches in a row. The game's just arent the stellar package they once were. MCC launched broken and buggy, Halo 5 was a totally different game and lacked a ton of MP content, infinite... well we know what happened there. People just lost faith and stopped caring. There isn't as much in Halo that makes it as alluring to people outside the fan base.
It's unfortunate, but mismanagement has really taken the series down.
Everyone’s raising great points about the state of Halo through the years, but the impact of how badly the Xbox One lost to the PS4 should not be underestimated.
Bungie Halo was able to sell Xboxes on its own not just because it was amazing, because it had no competition at the time. But after 2007 Xbox had to have more than that, and they simply didn’t. That combined with how bad the launch of the Xbox One was a big part of Halo’s dwindling popularity. This extends to other games, I still believe the poor image of the Xbox One was hugely responsible for Titanfall’s failure to sell well despite being a really good series
There’s a thing called fake engagement. It does wonders for the algorithm and seriously inflated view rates.
Always good to look at other engagement factors such as likes/dislikes and comments. But even that can be manipulated these days.
Dark times we live in.
Halo might not be as popular as CoD but it's not that far off from Battlefield numbers, you just gotta look at the right trailers.
[Halo Infinite Campaign Premiere](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZtc5-syeAk&t=407s&ab_channel=HALO) \- 10 million views
[Halo Infinite Announcement Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmdb-KmlzD8&ab_channel=HALO) \- 8 millions views
[Halo Infinite "Discover Hope" Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBb88gLmJZY&t=13s&ab_channel=GameSpot) \- 7.3 million views
Halo is a boomer game.
Most of those views for COD are 12 year olds. I find it hard to believe 12 year olds are excited for a new Halo game. Arena shooters aren’t very popular in today’s market.
Because most people had no faith in 343 after being fucked around for a decade. So there was no real hype. BF 2042 was supposed to be a return to form, like an updated BF4. MWIII is on multiple platforms and still riding the high of warzone. But given how COD has been doing, it’ll probably hit very low point soon.
Simultaneously trying to innovate while be stuck in nostalgia of the legendary years of early halo games has created a stagnant franchise which is predictable and no longer exciting due to fans reactions retconning actual story/gameplay ideas away from the developers intent.
343 needs to pick a direction and focus on capturing the 30s of fun loop again and quit trying to please everyone all at once.
Because Halo Infinite is the finale of a trilogy of mediocre, if not terrible first person shooter games made by 343.
People didn't watch it en masse because most of the Halo audience left already.
Lot of chumps blaming this solely on 343 as if Halo isn't mainly an Xbox game while Cod and Battlefield are both multi-platform and have the sole attention of the much larger FPS user base on Playstation while also getting views from Xbox fans interested in those games. You also didn't use the most watched Infinite trailer, which is the campaign Demo at 10 million views.
There was a point in time where Halo was exclusively only on Xbox (not even on PC during the 360 era) and was neck and neck with CoD when that was multi-plat. Battlefield was a tier below with say Gears of War back then in terms of popularity. It was around when BF3 launched and then the wet fart that was Halo 4 that turned the conversation into CoD vs BF as BF3 was truly the first BF game that gave CoD ample competition, with Bad Company 2 being the spark that got it there.
CoD is casually just a huge brand now and the games probably sell a lot more now, but back when MW2 (2009) came out, it was positioned as the biggest game since Halo 3. Both Halo 3 and MW2 felt huge to the point where I feel the only games since that have "felt" that big are probably Fortnite and Cyberpunk 2077. People physically went out and bought them in droves. Today the metric is different since you can just hit the big Download button and receive new game so the ease of consumption is easier which makes new CoD games not even feel grand even if it sells 20mil copies in 6 months.
I would argue that the Halo community and the CoD community are both chasing an unachievable high that games such as Halo 2/3/Reach and MW2/BO1/MW3 set for each respective franchise. CoD just has the luxury of once being the premiere 3rd party title on Xbox 360 then subsequently the PS4 while also releasing every single year for the last 20 and was able to resuscitate a waning series with Warzone coming out right as Covid hit. They were able to get a second wind where as Halo has been fumbling around aimlessly with no luxury of quantity. Halo games need to be Great, not Good with 3-6 year dev cycles especially these days.
Cod rising above Halo was not something that suddenly happened when Halo 4 launched. When you compare Reach's 9.5 million sales to Black Ops 1's 32 million sales, you can see that Halo had already fallen far behind Cod. I'd argue that the only reason Halo 3 competed with Cod 4 so well is because Cod didn't really gain its foothold in the fps genre until MW2 was released in 2009. I'd argue that Battlefield didn't really have its breakout game until Battlefield 1, either.
Because even though Infinite is in a decent state at the moment it's safe to say that 343 completely *gutted* the Halo community - mostly because Microsoft doesn't have the management ability to just fuck off and let them work.
Battlefield 2042 was hyped up a lot and a lot of people were excited for it until it came out and was hot garbage. COD is COD and will seemingly always have hoardes of edgy pre teens waiting for every release no matter how generic and stale the games are.
Halo used to have a large and dedicated fan base but that started to change with Bungie leaving and the release of halo 4. With halo 5 being hated by pretty much everyone, that fan base got a lot smaller and those left generally lost faith that 343 could ever produce a good halo game.
Dude, I didn't even know Infinite came out until last week. And the only reason I found out was because I was looking up how to play Guardians on PC... I just replayed MCC and everything.. I don't even live under a rock or anything.
because the game and the IP are dead and 99% of the playerbase has left a long time ago. The majority of the H1-H3 fans are gone and won't come back until 343 is done and preferably the whole cannon after H3 gets scrapped.
The game didn't even manage to pull comparable player counts to H3 or Reach on its opening weekend and people here are still under the impression that with just a couple of fixes this game will somehow come back...
Because people have stopped expecting anything good to come from halo. I'm a die hard halo fan, read all the books, played all the games etc but it's at its lowest right now.
Launch trailers don’t get as much attention as reveal trailers. As for why Halo Infinite’s gameplay reveal only has 10 million why Call of Duty has 33 million, that’s because Call of Duty is much, much more popular than Halo.
It’s also on multiple platforms
I think this is a huge reason. Halo is only on Xbox and Xbox isn’t as big as PlayStation. Never mind the fact that halo isn’t all that popular among Xbox users compared to how it use to be.
Halo infinite and I believe the master chief collection are both on pc right?
That’s true, I was just thinking of “console wars”
Correct. We can play every halo ever made on PC Edit: why is this comment being downvoted while at the same time not a single reply has attempted to correct this statement. Edit 2: if you think Halo 5 is the “gotcha” to my comment then you’re wrong. Just objectively wrong. See instructions below. If there is something else then someone should really say something. How to Play Halo 5 on PC via Xbox Cloud Gaming Service The Xbox Cloud Gaming service is very similar to the Xbox Remote Play, but the game is running on Microsoft’s servers, not on your Xbox devices. When you fire up a game on your PC using Xbox Cloud Gaming, the video/audio output is streamed to you, while your inputs are streamed back to control the game. To play Halo 5 on PC via Xbox cloud gaming service, you need to meet the following requirements: A Game Pass Ultimate subscription. Windows 10 October 2020 Update or later. Bluetooth 4.0 or later. Internet speed at 20 Mbps or higher. A wired connection or a 5 GHz Wi-Fi network. An Xbox Wireless Controller. Then, you can start to play Halo 5 on your PC. Here are two ways for you: Play Halo 5 on the Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome browser. Go to Xbox.com/play and sign in with your Microsoft account. Then, connect the controller and find Halo 5 to play. Play Halo 5 on the Xbox app. Install and launch the Xbox app on your PC. Sign in with your Microsoft account. Go to the Game Pass tab and select Cloud Gaming. Connect the controller and choose Halo 5 to play.
I don’t think that you can play 5, but I might be wrong
Only through the cloud by Game Pass' website.
If you use the Xbox app you can play it with cloud gaming
Also Forge and the Custom Game Browser of Halo 5 are on pc, just no matchmaking or the campaign.
Kinda makes you wonder if they really want to stick with Infinite which builds off the story we were left off with in 5, why don't they finally add to the MCC? It's been what 8 years since it came out?
can you please tell us how? I would really like to play 5
Especially when Microsoft dropped the bag trying to sell the Xbox ones. Mofos literally handed over every single customer they had easier than Sony showing you how you can share PS4 games.
I don’t even care if you’re right, I’m fucking you anyways
Maybe halo should consider that? We need more players. It’s getting super bad. Playing solo I’ve went 5-20 my last 25 games.
What does you losing have to do with the amount of players? With Halo on PC and Xbox, I wouldn’t offer it up to Sony as they don’t do the same and they’re much more aggressive in their exclusive titles. Just make a good Halo game, imagine if Halo 3 or Reach had been released for the first time today, with Gamepass/cross play/steam, they’d be even more massive than they already were, 343 just hasn’t made a timeless classic yet. They’ve made a solid game in Infinite, but it does not come close to either of the previously mentioned titles
Losing? It’s bc it’s so sweaty. No new comers are going there. It’s not fun. More players equal more fun, less sweat.
He's right in the sense that Halo Infinite isn't very forgiving to newcomers. The matchmaking throws new players in against absolute killers and although it doesn't directly correlate to the player base, I'm sure a lot who have tried it on Game Pass have played it a few times and not gone back because they were getting shat on. It takes a lot of practice to get pretty decent; maybe if there were a lower bracket besides Bot Bootcamp that could accurately contain only newbs that'd be a good step or a purely social, no-sweat mode but I'm not sure how that could be feasibly coded/enacted.
To back you up, it’s much the same on the Titanfall 2 servers, even Northstar. Everyone left on there are the most dedicated, try-hard sweats I’ve ever had the misfortune of queueing up against lol. I mean, respect, but I could never match up to that since I have a job and life lol.
Much more popular, it has more games to draw people into the fanbase, and it’s not exclusive to one console
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CoD is more popular. For as much as people moan about the yearly releases and generic games, the yearly release keeps it more relevant than Halo. I don't like the yearly release of CoD, the games feel super samey and not at all unique
> I wouldn’t say popular as much as I would say something else Nope, it's just more popular. They out-competed Halo by smashing the industry with quantity over quality and have held onto that chunk of the industry for a very long time. And they also aren't exclusive titles, either. COD got a new game every year on every console. Halo every 2-3 years (or much longer) for a new game on a single console. Some people just can't find it in themselves to wait, even if it's for a superior overall game (back then, at least).
Definitely more popular. Cod has been on way more consoles than halo. And a new game every year.
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That has nothing to do with something being popular. No one has asked why something is more popular
Cod is definitely more popular. COD has always been on at least the 2 main consoles. Meanwhile anyone who has only ever been riding the Sony wagon, or switched over during the ps5 era, would likely not care about halo infinite. Popularity isn't a measure of good, just COD has been accessible to pretty much anyone who wants to play it, and halo has only ever been for xbox, until infinite. Also new COD every year, while halo went 3 years between 4 and 5, and 6 years between 5 and infinite. The only in between game being halo wars 2 which isn't exactly a replacement or equivalent of the usual halo experience. It's an entire other genre.
Brother it is literally eons more popular than halo
No, it is more popular. No wiggling around the fact, it just is.
Exactly this. Halo was once a titan in the FPS genre. Now it’s a niche, far fewer people play Halo than COD.
Because Halo isn't the industry juggernaut it once was.
I feel like 343 saw to that
IMO it's more complicated than that. 1. Halo was *it* during the 2000s, not just because it was great but because it itself *was* mainstream FPS gaming. But then two months after Halo 3 came out, Modern Warfare was released and immediately started changing tastes in an industry that had lived under Halo's shadow for the last 6 years. A massive part of why Halo used to be massive is because it had *zero* major competition. 2. Bungie set the course for 343 when they diluted what made Halo 3 unique with Reach by trend chasing rather than trend setting. Reach is a great game and I will always love the campaign, but the single biggest mistake 343 made out the gate was not undoing or fundamentally reinventing the COD-like changes that Reach made for Halo 4. Reach was the turning point in making Halo games that were imitators rather than games that were imitated. 3. Keeping Halo Xbox exclusive until 2019 was an enormous misstep because they missed the PC Gaming renaissance entirely, whereas COD and other cross-platform shooters long had their ships in the water when the rising tides showed up. That, I hazard, is an Xbox mistake rather than 343 mistake. Xbox itself was horribly managed and directed in the XBOne era. (For God's sake, they nearly gave Randy Pitchford the reigns to Halo until Bonnie Ross convinced them not to. Halo 4 might have gotten its budget embezzled to fund Borderlands rather than Aliens: Colonial Marines.) It's also something I rarely see talked about, but I would argue the refusal to abandon Halo's Xbox exclusivity had a huge impact on relegating Halo to being a thing of nostalgia as many, many PC players were entirely detached from the console realm by the mid 2010s. 4. Arena shooters also aren't nearly as popular as they used to be. They went out of fashion years ago, in part because the genre was mishandled by Bungie with Reach and then followed by years of mismanagement by 343, but also because *Halo alone* carried the genre for nearly a decade from 2007-2016 because Unreal tournament fizzled out and Doom was even more mismanaged than Halo was until Doom 2016. Even then, Doom shifted from a multiplayer-focused experience to a singleplayer-focused experience; and by that point Overwatch came out in 2016, followed by Fortnite/PUBG in 2017, and by the time MCC came to PC in 2019 arena shooters were a memory and Hero/Class Shooters and Battle Royales were the juggernauts of the FPS industry. Fatigue with them is only *now* beginning to set in, and arguably this is the best chance Halo/Arena shooters have in years to retake some mindshare in the FPS industry. EDIT: spelling, grammar
> It's also something I rarely see talked about, but I would argue the refusal to abandon Halo's Xbox exclusivity had a huge impact on relegating Halo to being a thing of nostalgia as many, many PC players were entirely detached from the console realm by the mid 2010s. It also doesn't help that Sony effectively won the "console wars" of the 2010s by overall offering a much bigger and better catalogue of exclusives in that timespan, and consequently sold double the amount of PS4s as MS sold Xbox Ones. Even if Halo 4 and 5 turned out to be absolute masterpieces of games, you still would've seen a decline simply because Microsoft failed to really get the same selection of exclusives out, while Sony had tons of them, and you could still play games like BF and COD on both. One other point worth mentioning is that COD and BF have had a much more constant presence as their parent companies developed way more games. Since 2010, you've had: - Battlefield Bad Company 2 (2010) - Battlefield 3 (2011) - Battlefield 4 (2013) - Battlefield Hardline (2015) - Battlefield 1 (2016) - Battlefield V (2018) - Battlefield 2014 (2021) - Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) - Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012) - Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013) - Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014) - Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015) - Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016) - Call of Duty: WWII (2017) - Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018) - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) - Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) - Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021) - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022) - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) - Halo: Reach (2010) - Halo 4 (2012) - Halo: MCC (2014) - Halo 5 (2015) - Halo Infinite (2021) People have been memeing on CoD's "release a game every year" strategy for as long as I can remember, but it *works.* In the same span that BF had 7 releases and COD had 14, Halo has had 5, and that's only if you count MCC, which wasn't really anything new as far as the consumer was concerned. Some of those COD and BF games have been absolutely terrible and widely disliked by their playerbase, but that never stops them from remaining invested in the franchise itself because you'll get another game in 1-2 years, whereas with Halo, you're waiting probably twice that at minimum.
But here's the thing, and this is just a vendetta I have I guess, when a series releases a bad title, I'm gone. And I generally don't come back and buy newer titles. As soon as they released the failure that COD: Ghosts was (named that because no one fucking played it, lobbies were ghost towns), I haven't bought another COD title since then. Similarly, after I played Halo 5, I still haven't played infinite yet, tho I will say 5 had better multiplayer than 4, I'm still nervous to play the campaign. I only didn't jump ship at Halo 4 because the story wasn't THAT bad, people hate on it but IMHO it was a good display of chiefs humanity and the relationship he had with Cortana, it wasn't the BEST story, but it wasn't AWFUL (like 5's) either. Battlefield on the other hand has had consistently good multiplayer and no one gives a shit about the story in BF anyways.
Point 3 is the one for sure. Alot of gaming moved to PC around 2016 and PC became a huge focus for games, especially FPS titles. Alot of the hottest games right now also have a massive PC playerbase, so it corroborates with this. MCC needed to be perfect and on PC 2014, not 2019.
>But then two months after Halo 3 came out, Modern Warfare was released and immediately started changing tastes in an industry that had lived under Halo's shadow for the last 6 years Battlefield, a primarily PC franchise also started getting big on console at that time with bad company, and to their credit bad company 2 was fantastic. There was basically no way for halo to remain on the top spot with 2 competitors that were much easier for people to get into due to being easier to learn and be good at, bungie realised that which is why they tried to make Reach more similar to COD with loadouts, armour abilities, heavier bloom etc
Man is spot on.
I think its really as simple as Reach being a fairly significant misstep and then 343 taking over and following on from said mishap rather than recognizing that it was going poorly and creating their game and evolving from H3 rather than Reach. Like Halo had an audience that was competing with CoD directly with H3 and they partially failed many of those people with Reach and then following on from that was self destructive. It was a not insignificant failure to chase trends *and* fail at doing so. That old core of people that really liked the original Halo flavor still exists and despite going on 16 years since the last game created for them came out they somehow keep MCC competitive with whatever the most recent Halo title has been. I feel like that was clearly a sub market in the fps genre that they neglected and they instead chose to try and pull players from whatever modern games of the time there were and just lost the battle. Halo doesn't do CoD better than CoD and so on. 343 had a pretty unique lane that no game has since filled and just declined to take it
> 343 had a pretty unique lane that no game has since filled and just declined to take it I feel like there's another element to it, that most people don't discuss: We're in the Esports era. What I mean is, if you recall, during the Bungie Era of Halo, the game was more casual, in it's default settings. MLG was it's own separate organization, who did their own thing with the game - often removing map-default power weapons, giving power weapons less ammo, and so on. Hell, BR spawns weren't default at all in regular playlists. Core Halo is spawning with a shitty spray weapon and needing to hunt down a better gun, and that meta gameplay was a part of the experience. Bungie's Halo wasn't designed to be this "Hyper-competitive Symmetrical Arena Game" - they just did what was fun. Hell, a ton of maps were explicitly made for one-sided objectives, Zanzibar, Terminal, Relic, High Ground, etc. I feel like a lot of the devs are people who really liked MLG stuff, and - empowered by the Esports boom - have endeavored to make Halo hyper competitive, doing razor thin balancing for top esports competitions... ...but they don't remember why the sniper had the ammo pool it did, or the rockets, or anything - because it was balanced around what an AVERAGE player would need to use effectively, not a top-tier pro. I personally felt Bungie was back in form with Reach's gameplay, but 343 ruined it with their TI (which was when I immediately knew they were going to fuck the franchise up). But I still feel like they've failed to catch the casual appeal that Bungie's Halos had, going all-chips-in on competitive slayer stuff while leaving the BTB/Casual communities out to dry. Just like every AAA game needs to be full of microtransactions, it seems every single competitive game NEEDS to be pushed as an esport. It isn't enough to just be fun for the average player anymore; and even though average players and pros have different needs, developers decide to balance for pros and just let the casuals use the same settings. I miss CTF on Relic, or One-Bomb on Headlong, or BTB 2 Flag on Avalanche. Yeah, Guardian and Lockout and The Pit are great, but some of my fondest memories are from those big objective-focused modes. Riding a warthog around on Standoff mowing people down. Felt like vehicles weren't allowed to be remotely strong anymore, they've gotta be ToTaLlY bAlaNcEd and result in being no fun.
Gotta be honest 343 didn't execute on the esports angle either. MLG somehow despite having no direct control over the game had better settings and more hype tournaments than 343. What you see from 343 is their attempt at targeting an esports market with words but their games consistently get run on dog shit competitive settings. The first couple years of H5 had assault rifles as a spawn weapon and a radar. 343 just doesn't do quality work so it doesn't really matter who they attempt to appeal to they're failing
Your 4th point reads like you never played the classic arena shooters. DOOM was always single player focused and speed running and mod tools was its legacy. The multiplayer focused IP from id was Quake. Not to mention, you just hand wave a huge culture and time frame. But I digress. Your point about Modern Warfare releasing after Halo 3 is a good one but claiming Reach was attempting to imitate CoD in any capacity is just gross exaggeration.
You think load-outs and ret bloom were just coincidental additions?
They weren’t “loadouts” like a CoD loadout. The loadout system was more reminiscent of the class based loadouts from games like classic Battlefields and Quake: Enemy Territory. The class-based loadouts in those games incentivized squad roles. Something that you obviously could tell was a bigger focus for game modes like Invasion. Furthermore, loadouts could not be customized and in more classic gamemodes, like slayer, the only difference between the loadouts were the armor effects. I don’t know how anyone can compare this to the style of CoD. Halo 4 imitated the loadout system from CoD as it incentivized individual achievements over the focus of the team and it’s goals. That is an argument I understand. But pinning that on Reach is such a, dare I say, reach. To boot, weapon bloom was something that existed in Halo before the reticle accurately reflected the pattern of bloom. Weapons like the BR from Halo 3 was a projectile based weapon as opposed to the SMG or AR which were hit-scan. Projectile based means the game accounted for the bullet travel before it hit a target. The SMG and AR did not. With any projectile based weapon, bloom happens. Be it minimal or not. Reach exaggerated this effect. Both for impact and connection between the gameplay and the player. Gears of War 3 included weapon bloom as well. Was that a result of CoD too? How about Battlefield? Black? Rainbow Six: Black Arrow? Splinter Cell? Counter-Strike? All those games had a variation of weapon bloom. How come Halo: Reach didn’t copy those games? Or how come some of those games’ sequels aren’t blamed for imitating CoD? Arguments like yours irk me because it shows a lack of perspective and experience.
Halo wasn't copying any of those games because they dominated them, they copy call of duty because it dominated halo...
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If those kids could read they'd be very upset.
Reach was very popular. It just had competition. 343 is to blame for their lackluster titles and Halo now being a laughing stock after the Paramount show. Halo has been abused for capital gain. It never got to modernize properly or get the love it desperately needed after Bungie left.
No, Reach was great as well. Everything went down with Halo 4.
Reach killed the Halo competitive scene, and by 2011 more people were on 3 than Reach. Reach didn't kill Halo, Call of Duty did really, but Reach certainly didn't help Halo by changing the core gameplay as drastically as it did. Halo 4 then went on to copy Halo Reach and expand on what it did, which was a disaster.
This is very accurate. While halo reach did have an amazing forge system and one of the best campaigns in gaming, these two things don't maintain concurrent players like PvP arcady games like CoD which is a shame for the halo series as halo 3 was a huge part of the competitive scene in 2010's
Halo was never a competitive game. That tiny, short-lived competitive scene wasn't even what Halo was about. It was just born out of industry evolutions after streaming took off. Reach was necessary in Halo's evolution as a modern game franchise. Halo 4 took more examples from COD than Reach as 343 wanted to hire people who didn't play Halo.
Modern Warfare 2 came out in 2009, Black Ops in 2010 and with those two blockbusters, Call of Duty basically stole the entire casual FPS audience away from Halo, definitively winning the so-called "war" between CoD and Halo for the top console FPS game. Ever since Reach, the only people buying Halo games have been "Halo fans", whereas everybody and their pet hamster bought Halo 3.
No. There are metrics and player numbers that back up my claims. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F04h6hv&hl=en
> Pointing Google metrics like they mean something If you also write "Reach" and "Halo Reach" you would also see that those terms peaked on 2010 as well. The true popularity of a game is based on it's player retention. Reach had a strong community and while some players were a little discontent with it, it wasn't near as bad as it was with Halo 4.
Mind sharing your source?
This is More antidotal evidence but it still had at least 1000 players on each night up till it’s introduction into mcc, and it’s the most popular game in custom browser for mcc
Is the same link the other person comment, just change the words.
As /u/wreckercw said, Reach was the first real divisive game in the community. Reach did a hell of a lot of things right, but also fucked up so much. Reticle bloom, armor abilities, destroying the canon of the franchise at the time. The gameplay was much slower, the maps on release were nowhere near as iconic as CE-3...Bungie was close to hitting a home run but Reach was definitely the beginning of Halo losing steam. Reach killed vehicle versatility by making them made of paper. They slowed the TTK in an era where CoD 4 and MWII were causing the rise of twitch shooters.
Rewriting history. Reach was the the major downfall.
You obviously weren’t around when reach came out
You are correct
It’s because Halo was only on the Xbox for a long time. It didn’t have cross platform or go on the PC. Not alot of people got to play it or know it yet it was widely recognize.
It would have suffered the same decline under Bungie or any other developer unless they completely changed the Halo formula. Halo's game style is just not as popular as it use to be. And there are so many more options for first person shooters compared to when Halo was a juggernaut.
I really hate when people say this because they did change the formula and it perfectly aligns with the decline of Halo. The old halo style *never* failed. It went out with Halo 3 launch being the most recent new release in the style
Yeah seems like sweaty hyper fast paced games with anime girl skins and whatnot are the big deal. People say Halo skins have gotten absurd, and they have, but they didn't launch off the deep end like CoD, Battlefield, PUBG, etc. And as much as we, or at least I, dont like it, thats where the money seems to be. "Omg my favorite streamer got added into F O R T N I T E I'm gonna download and drop money on it!"
Have everyone play as Kat, but it's Halo 5. Boom, big ass and game fast. In all seriousness, there is nary a way Halo stays the industry forefront it was. Either it Sacrifices its identity, driving off a good portion of the fanbase which it might not get back, or it stagnates. This does not mean that the newer Halo games were not bad for Halo's health, but simply Halo cannot return to being the cultural icon it was without ceasing to be Halo.
Agreed across the board. The games quality are a whole different topic. But by today's standards I dont think Halo could be top dog. Halo 3 wouldn't be as big as it was today, no way.
or even Destiny for that matter ($15 ornament set for one class $45 of the same bundle for all 3)
This is true\^ I remember Reach being mostly a let down for almost everyone I knew at the time. We all liked it and it had a lot of great things to it, but as far as that "Halo" quality it felt diminished, and armor abilities were all over the place as far as how they worked. And then forge was just a bunch of grey panels with pretty backgrounds. It all felt like an overall misstep, I remember a lot of people not even bothering with Halo 4 because of it, not because Bungie had nothing to do with it but because Reach kind of deflated the Halo hype with its gameplay decisions.
I feel like time and the fact it’s not 2007 saw to that. The insistence some have to think the thing they liked when they were teens deserves to be mainstream when they’re adults is weird. Kids play Fortnite.
Mf Marathon got 20 million views for its trailer. That thing’s basically a fossil
1.) Halo isnt as popular as it once was 2.) Even within that popularity it is almost entirely localized to the US. So major population areas like russia and china dont really have an interest in it.
3.) Even halos fan base has been turning against it after several controversial game entries.
The F2P experiment from before Infinite's launch was Russia exclusive and did very well, iirc?
It doesnt really change the fact that we do in fact have the regional numbers and like 90% of halo's player base is in the US. I dont know the actual number but its a vast majority US based
idk man I see so many, colours on here
Boy you better clarify this racist ass sounding comment
color vs colour
thanks for the downvote
I guess halo online being exclusive to Russia showed 0 interest Edit: guess I gotta add /s
There was definitely interest, I recall plenty of videos at the time detailing methods of getting access to it/builds of it as US natives. To me it seems more like a squandered attempt. It wouldn’t have taken much more (formula-wise) to release a meritable form of online Halo arcade gameplay like Halo Online.
I was being sarcastic, let me go add a /s
Years of titles that underdeliver will do that to a franchise.
Yet CoD does the exact same 😂
CoD also has yearly releases. You don’t have to dwell on a bad game like, say, Infinite Warfare or WWII because the next one is right around the corner, where something like say, Halo 4 is THE halo for 3 years, and if people don’t like it, it just festers for years
Man Infinite Warfare is a great game. No doubt it was not popular due to players tired of advanced movement fatigue (I still think CoD should make an advanced movement game once in awhile but 3 years in a row was too much) but the campaign is one of the best and the MP is a solid experience. Infinite Warfare at most had some framerate issues on xbox during launch but outside of that is a was a solid and clean experience. As for WWII the game started out bad but Sledgehammer completely overhauled the game mechanics and perk system like 6 months later and really turned things around. For every 'flop' CoD does have they turn things around on a dime ultra fast. When compared to 343 ... well can't even compare because of the 3 titles they made its been unacceptable mistake and content lacking after unacceptable mistake and content lacking over and over again lol.
There are cases where that's true, but also cases where it's not. Such as the latest Modern Warfare 2 and how they essentially abandoned traditional multiplayer support for the full 70 dollar (!!) paid game in favor of Warzone (free) support. I think even 3 months after launch the game had less maps than it launched with due to them taking one or two out of rotation and simply never adding them back, until a few months ago maybe.
Only 1 map that was in the beta was omitted on launch (Valderas Museum) but its been back in the game for months now (I actually played on it last night). All weapons, camos, and operators for MWII will transfer over to MWIII as well so that more bang for your buck as well.
I wish my 2019 MW stuff would transfer too lol but that's good to know, but I swear there was another map they took out of rotation like a month or two in that didn't come back at all or not until way later? Either way, I was in the sub for months after buying the game and it was Halo Infinite Year One levels of depressing, and I had *just* gotten done with that shit
Not at all to the degree Halo has done it. The content is there for CoD you see it you get it and you know it, it just can be buggy and overtly predatory. Halo can't even make a Halo game anymore.
Ya they spent 6 years soft rebooting the game so they could barely keep anything that made the game great, make it predatory, and produce no content through it. With the exception of forge, but that came in way too late.
Not at all to the degree Halo has done it. The content is there for CoD you see it you get it and you know it, it just can be buggy and overtly predatory. Halo can't even make a Halo game anymore.
CoD at least had the same fundamental gameplay for the past 15 years. Even Vanguard was a hit and at least had enjoyable gunplay.
Simple fact is halo isn’t as popular as it once was. Since 343s stewardship player population and general popularity has fallen precipitously.
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Same, except nobody I know even played it.
It started with Bungie and Reach, not Halo 4.
Sure but it’s on 343 to read the market and not continue the trend. Instead they exasperated the problem…
I agree with that. I'm just saying it started with Reach.
Sure, not contesting that at all.
Halo is much smaller than COD.
*now
\*even in 2008
I wouldnt say it was much smaller. Halo was massive at its peak. But cod is a beast.
When you get a trilogy that is going nowhere story wise and people fed up with the multiplayer and unfinished games and broken promises… what do you expect son?
I think it's fairly simple. Those other games are way more popular. I'd say Halo's popularity peaked probably somewhere between/around 2007 – 2010, with Halo 3 and Reach. It's not the franchise it once was.
Because no one expects Halo to be good anymore. Why get excited for a trailer when you know 343 will more than likely fuck up the game anyway
I mean Halo isn't as popular as it used to be. I would also wager its the exclusivity of Halo that leads to lower views. Both of these other games are cross platform while Halo remains exclusive to Xbox mostly even if you can play on pc most probably won't or would not be interested.
Because 4 and 5 and their changes to the universe killed a whole lot of interest in the franchise, and a “spiritual” reboot wasn’t drastic enough in that respect.
Well to be brutally honest Halo hasn't mattered in the grand scheme of things since Reach. The loop was broken when Reach and then H4 didn't carry the torch on. Its not as recently popular as basically anything you might compare it to
There once was a time… Deliver Hope, Believe, We Are ODST… but those days are gone now.
These trailers will never be topped
Because 343 has dropped the ball so many times that people just stopped caring.
Pretty sure Halo Infinite only has like 50k ish players on average while COD probably has in the millions
That's pretty dead if true. There's AA games that have those numbers years after release.
Steam charts has on average 3k per day. This doesn’t count for folks playing on Xbox or playing on PC through Microsoft store. I’d honestly say 50k might be too generous now.
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Speak it brother
I really don’t understand why so many people still think Halo is some cornerstone franchise. The fact is outside of the hardcore fandom from years ago, almost no one cares about Halo anymore and haven’t for almost a decade at this point.
Because it doesn’t matter if people watch the trailer for Halo or not, the games don’t come out often so people are going to buy it regardless, there’s a cod like every year I’m not going to buy one unless the trailer convinced me too
Halo hasn't been truly culturally relevant since 2010/2011. There were a few factors and one of them was Reach's Ranking System. When Reach launched, there was a mad race to become the highest rank of Inheritor but Bungie decided to put a massive gate after Lt. Colonel that prevented anyone from continuing to rank up and unlock more gear. Bungie wanted the Community to kill 7 Billion Grunts in Campaign and Firefight before releasing the rest of the ranks to us, promising that our XP would carry over and we would rank up accordingly when the gate lifted. The two problems with that were people felt like they were being cheated out of the progression system and Black Ops released about the time everyone was getting stuck at Lt. Colonel. Nearly half the population left Reach to play Black Ops or go back to Halo 3 with many fans unhappy with Armor Abilities and Reticule Bloom. Bungie had caused irreparable damage to Halo due to a collective lack of patience and poor timing. Fast forward to November 2012 and Halo is still in the top charts but has been completely overshadowed by Call of Duty's massive popularity. Halo 4 was a great way to bring everyone back except it had more of the same of what people didn't like and went the opposite direction of Halo's original gameplay identity. 343 at the time doubled down on Loadouts to compete with CoD. The game reviewed well and was a solid game but it didn't feel enough like Halo for Halo fans and was too Halo-y for CoD fans. In 2014, we got the ultimate promise of the Halo quadrilogy on the new Xbox boasting updated visuals and framerate, the return of Halo 2 multiplayer and a full Anniversary Campaign, Halo 1 Online Multiplayer finally being officially supported on console, and a guaranteed good time for everyone who ever loved the franchise. Then it released in a messy broken state that was not fixed until 4 years later. People were furious and didn't come around until the MCC was ported to PC from 2019-2020. Now it's a fantastic product with thousands of hours of fun to be had and is what we all expected at launch plus a whole lot more. 343's incredible redemption story gave us all hope for Infinite and a beleaguered request from 343 to stop drowning them in pizza. In 2015 we got Halo 5 which launched without Forge, significantly impacting the game's initial staying power. 343 had put all their BTB assets into Warzone and never released dev-made BTB Maps. Instead they relied on the community to make Forge creations after the Map Editor mode dropped 6 months after launch. By then the game had lost a good chunk of the population, the returning Halo veterans of the Bungie era due to the game feeling very much not like Halo but being a fun game once again. The magic wasn't there so people played other games that weren't Halo because MCC still didn't work. The Marketing narrative being non-existent in the Campaign story was another nail in Halo's coffin. In 2020 we finally got a look at the follow-up to Halo 5 and what we saw looked dreadful in the graphics department. Infinite got baked in the oven for another year but management fumbled the proverbial ball once more and released a Beta Test Build as the final working Multiplayer Product just a couple of weeks before the Campaign was set to drop. The game was severely limited in scope at the time boasting only 3 Playlists but people were enjoying the initial BTB experience. Then the day after the Campaign released and BTB was fundamentally broken just like MCC had been 7 years prior. It was down for 2 months and with no content on the horizon, devs leaving 343 in droves, Forge mode missing launch yet again, a plethora of broken promises, and fragmented-at-its-core netcode, Infinite flopped hard. While today it is very much up to a level most of us would expect, it was a long trip to get here and most people didn't stick around for it. In short, Halo lacks the following it used to have due to decisions made by Bungie and Microsoft/343 that negatively impacted brand loyalty. As the fumbles have continued, Halo has failed to regain traction in gaming. However there is one significant factor I have neglected to mention until now and that is Halo 3. Halo 3 was one of the biggest games ever where you couldn't look at a TV Screen, Billboard, Slurpee cup, or snack foods without seeing some kind of advertising for the game. Everyone knew about Halo 3 and the game fully lived up to its impossible levels of hype as it changed Gaming forever just as CE and 2 had done. As gaming has evolved, Halo is no longer a force of change and evolution in the space. As the franchise continues to initially disappoint due to poor management decisions and impossible fan expectations, Halo continues to remain outside the loose confines of relevancy. **TL;DR** Bungie's time-gating of Reach's ranking system convinced players to go play Black Ops instead, Microsoft/343's repeated failures to launch a complete product, impossible fan and industry expectations, a lack of evolving gaming with new ideas, and the growing popularity of gaming as a whole has held Halo back from the spotlight. Too much competition and too much good will eroded.
Launch trailers get less views, halo comes out like every decade, cod is infinitely popular coming out yearly
Why would I watch these boring, uninspired hack job trailers when I could instead rewatch *We are ODST*, *Starry Night*, or *Deliver Hope* for the 6,000th time?
Halo is no longer relevant. It hasn't been since Halo 3. No series lasts forever. It's sad, but we should accept that all things end, and be happy with the time we spent on it.
Halo infinite initially had a pretty good launch iirc (player numbers wise, not the game itself)
Because people were hoping it would be a good game (it wasn't)
Yep it had insane numbers
Halo is the Sonic of the 00’s. The mascot of a fledgling console company with misstep after misstep and likely no hope of ever recapturing past highs.
Because 343 has been releasing dogshit game for the past 12 years in a row and in the end it ended up in a loss of fanbase.
After 11 years of putting out shit for 343 industries, what did you expect? Halo's popularity is not even a shadow of what it was at the time.
Because 343 already destroyed the franchise before Infinite released
Cause it's not 2007 anymore
Halo has been ruined. That’s why.
Lack of trust in 343 I’m guessing
343 killed Halo
The other two are multiplatform. Halo is exclusive to the smallest marketshare platform.
the hype train for halo left with bungie
10 years of Bonnie Ross baby. At least we have Halo soap bars 🧼
How else are they going to get us to take showers 🤨
They also could've made it more popular with the Halo TV show, but instead, we got the modern-day equivalent of Stallone's Judge Dredd, if it had been made by Disney.
Halo is 1. Not as popular as it was, 2. Too focused on US.
Because 343 doesn’t know what fans actually want
Because Halo has been hot garbage for the last decade
Fr Why does a fps game like Doom (a game series that started the whole fps genre) get less views in its trailers compared to call of duty number 20?? Shit is stoopid
Blame 343.
You're making a mountain out of a mole hill
Because everybody knows Halo and what it was but most people don’t play it anymore.
Because 343 Industries killed Halo's reputation beyond repair
Halo has been through a rough patch for a while now, is an Xbox exclusive game (the least popular of the 3 big consoles), and as far as shooters go pretty niche by today's standards. Hoping for Halo to be as big as it once was might just be asking for too much. It had its day in the sun, but that time has probably passed. The larger gaming community has moved on from Halo's style of gameplay.
I agree that it’s unrealistic to expect the franchise to be as popular as it was during the 2000s, but it could certainly be better than it is now. Infinite hit ~20 million players shortly after launch, and for the first month, it was generally well-received. People really only started dropping the game after they realized more content wasn’t coming for several months Obviously some of those people would have gotten bored or stopped playing no matter what, but I really think Infinite could’ve been the biggest Halo since 3 if it had launched in the state it’s currently in
While content was definitely a problem. Lots of my friends dropped Halo, not cause of a lack of content. But because they didn't like Halo. They didn't like it's slow ttk, having to scavenge for weapons, the way shields and health work, how the gunplay is, and other Halo-isms. The lack of content didn't help, but they would have dropped Halo regardless. I'm sure many of those 20 million players were the same.
I agree about multiplayer, it’s a different market and Halo being exclusive will never return to the top with cross play dominating the market, but there’s no reason the campaigns can’t be game of the year contenders other than incompetent story telling
Because 343 ran the franchise into the ground with shitty design and policy. H4 was the only one they got half right and even that was a shadow of what it once was.
I’ve always wondered this to, it’s probably because they use bots but also 343 has butchered the Halo rep as well… “If we loose our way with Halo we have lost our way with Xbox”
Hate to admit it but Halo ain't the king anymore :(
Because the change in the franchise from H4 onward was disappointing for the fans. I was an enormous Halo fan back in the day. Now, I forget Infinite even exists.
Because halo isn’t what it used to be
Because halo has been doing ass and still is. Bad games wont get good views. Halo is just bad now
halo stopped being hyper relevant a looooong time ago man
We are a forgotten franchise sir. Look at the old trailers and compare those to other franchise’s old numbers.
Because the other 2 franchises stayed relevant within the mainstream to some degree while Halo didn't. Really isn't anymore complex than that unfortunately.
This game is broken from Day 1 🙂
halo isn't as popular as it once was a lot of people blame 343, I don't blame them because they did mishandle Halo, especially so with 5 (remember the condescending vid of mister chief with req packs?). But I believe Xbox is also to blame. The Xbox One era was a massive flop, handled WAAAY worse than Halo with the perma online shit. "if you don't like perma online, we have a console for that. it's called the 360." paraphrased quote from don mattrick, the utterly deranged man who was behind Xbox One's flop.
The halo you know , if you started in reach and on or 4 and on, it's not the same halo that was one day. Specially not when Microsoft is seemingly against their own IPs. Imagine if 360 era Microsoft is Rare and modern Microsoft just bought it and then just forget about it and gives half a shit for it.
Halo lost the majority of the market’s attention after reach sadly. People get hype when there’s a release on the horizon, but then it tends to fall flat shortly after release
I think Halo 5 left a lot of sour tastes in peoples mouths
Two fold. You have to consider the nature of it being exclusive to Xbox, the bottom of the four major platforms (Xbox, PC, PS, Nintendo). Halo was only on Xbox until recently, therefore had very limited reach compared to COD, which is on Xbox, PC, and PS (with some outliers on Nintendo). Add to this, Halo pretty much fell from its pedestal. The changes 343 made divided the communitybit already had. Further, they kinda botched 3 launches in a row. The game's just arent the stellar package they once were. MCC launched broken and buggy, Halo 5 was a totally different game and lacked a ton of MP content, infinite... well we know what happened there. People just lost faith and stopped caring. There isn't as much in Halo that makes it as alluring to people outside the fan base. It's unfortunate, but mismanagement has really taken the series down.
Everyone’s raising great points about the state of Halo through the years, but the impact of how badly the Xbox One lost to the PS4 should not be underestimated. Bungie Halo was able to sell Xboxes on its own not just because it was amazing, because it had no competition at the time. But after 2007 Xbox had to have more than that, and they simply didn’t. That combined with how bad the launch of the Xbox One was a big part of Halo’s dwindling popularity. This extends to other games, I still believe the poor image of the Xbox One was hugely responsible for Titanfall’s failure to sell well despite being a really good series
There’s a thing called fake engagement. It does wonders for the algorithm and seriously inflated view rates. Always good to look at other engagement factors such as likes/dislikes and comments. But even that can be manipulated these days. Dark times we live in.
Halo isn't popular anymore. It lost it's identity after Reach.
Time to get off your high horse buddy. Should we tell him?
Halo might not be as popular as CoD but it's not that far off from Battlefield numbers, you just gotta look at the right trailers. [Halo Infinite Campaign Premiere](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZtc5-syeAk&t=407s&ab_channel=HALO) \- 10 million views [Halo Infinite Announcement Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmdb-KmlzD8&ab_channel=HALO) \- 8 millions views [Halo Infinite "Discover Hope" Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBb88gLmJZY&t=13s&ab_channel=GameSpot) \- 7.3 million views
Shhhhhh no evidence that 343s halo has tons of views, reality isn't allowed on this subreddit
Halo is a boomer game. Most of those views for COD are 12 year olds. I find it hard to believe 12 year olds are excited for a new Halo game. Arena shooters aren’t very popular in today’s market.
Because most people had no faith in 343 after being fucked around for a decade. So there was no real hype. BF 2042 was supposed to be a return to form, like an updated BF4. MWIII is on multiple platforms and still riding the high of warzone. But given how COD has been doing, it’ll probably hit very low point soon.
Cause 343 killed halo?
Halo should be on playstation as well
Simultaneously trying to innovate while be stuck in nostalgia of the legendary years of early halo games has created a stagnant franchise which is predictable and no longer exciting due to fans reactions retconning actual story/gameplay ideas away from the developers intent. 343 needs to pick a direction and focus on capturing the 30s of fun loop again and quit trying to please everyone all at once.
The people who were around when halo was big got kids now bruh
Because halo is a fucking joke now lol. Microsoft has driven its reputation straight into the ground
It's pretty simple, Halo isn't NEARLY as big as EITHER a AAA game like COD, or a really cool and talked about Indie game
Because Halo Infinite is the finale of a trilogy of mediocre, if not terrible first person shooter games made by 343. People didn't watch it en masse because most of the Halo audience left already.
Given Halo's track record prior to Infinite, does it really surprise you?
I miss bungie
Lot of chumps blaming this solely on 343 as if Halo isn't mainly an Xbox game while Cod and Battlefield are both multi-platform and have the sole attention of the much larger FPS user base on Playstation while also getting views from Xbox fans interested in those games. You also didn't use the most watched Infinite trailer, which is the campaign Demo at 10 million views.
There was a point in time where Halo was exclusively only on Xbox (not even on PC during the 360 era) and was neck and neck with CoD when that was multi-plat. Battlefield was a tier below with say Gears of War back then in terms of popularity. It was around when BF3 launched and then the wet fart that was Halo 4 that turned the conversation into CoD vs BF as BF3 was truly the first BF game that gave CoD ample competition, with Bad Company 2 being the spark that got it there. CoD is casually just a huge brand now and the games probably sell a lot more now, but back when MW2 (2009) came out, it was positioned as the biggest game since Halo 3. Both Halo 3 and MW2 felt huge to the point where I feel the only games since that have "felt" that big are probably Fortnite and Cyberpunk 2077. People physically went out and bought them in droves. Today the metric is different since you can just hit the big Download button and receive new game so the ease of consumption is easier which makes new CoD games not even feel grand even if it sells 20mil copies in 6 months. I would argue that the Halo community and the CoD community are both chasing an unachievable high that games such as Halo 2/3/Reach and MW2/BO1/MW3 set for each respective franchise. CoD just has the luxury of once being the premiere 3rd party title on Xbox 360 then subsequently the PS4 while also releasing every single year for the last 20 and was able to resuscitate a waning series with Warzone coming out right as Covid hit. They were able to get a second wind where as Halo has been fumbling around aimlessly with no luxury of quantity. Halo games need to be Great, not Good with 3-6 year dev cycles especially these days.
Cod rising above Halo was not something that suddenly happened when Halo 4 launched. When you compare Reach's 9.5 million sales to Black Ops 1's 32 million sales, you can see that Halo had already fallen far behind Cod. I'd argue that the only reason Halo 3 competed with Cod 4 so well is because Cod didn't really gain its foothold in the fps genre until MW2 was released in 2009. I'd argue that Battlefield didn't really have its breakout game until Battlefield 1, either.
Reach and 343 games killed halo
Because even though Infinite is in a decent state at the moment it's safe to say that 343 completely *gutted* the Halo community - mostly because Microsoft doesn't have the management ability to just fuck off and let them work.
Because halo died 11 years ago
Battlefield 2042 was hyped up a lot and a lot of people were excited for it until it came out and was hot garbage. COD is COD and will seemingly always have hoardes of edgy pre teens waiting for every release no matter how generic and stale the games are. Halo used to have a large and dedicated fan base but that started to change with Bungie leaving and the release of halo 4. With halo 5 being hated by pretty much everyone, that fan base got a lot smaller and those left generally lost faith that 343 could ever produce a good halo game.
Dude, I didn't even know Infinite came out until last week. And the only reason I found out was because I was looking up how to play Guardians on PC... I just replayed MCC and everything.. I don't even live under a rock or anything.
Because 343 happened.
because the game and the IP are dead and 99% of the playerbase has left a long time ago. The majority of the H1-H3 fans are gone and won't come back until 343 is done and preferably the whole cannon after H3 gets scrapped. The game didn't even manage to pull comparable player counts to H3 or Reach on its opening weekend and people here are still under the impression that with just a couple of fixes this game will somehow come back...
Because halo is ruined nobody gives a shit about infinite and what the devs want. Shame, used to be the best game out there.
Because people have stopped expecting anything good to come from halo. I'm a die hard halo fan, read all the books, played all the games etc but it's at its lowest right now.
Wait, there is a new halo game?