As I’ve said before, Halo Infinite is good now, and that has never been more true after season 5 launched with awesome an awesome Flood theme, Forge AI and the return of Firefight to the Halo franchise.
Halo and Xbox fans have been dying to see the game become a turnaround story after a rocky multiplayer start, and by season 5, this really does seem like it’s the Halo that everyone at least says they want to play. But is that actually translating into real results and playercount surges?
That’s a little more up in the air.
So, the numbers. Lately, Halo Infinite on Steam has been averaging 7-8,000 at its peak. Back in September, that was more like 6,700. Now, it has hit a peak of 18,003 for season 5 launch, its highest concurrent figure since May of 2022.
These are better figures than we’ve seen previously. June’s season 4 launch barely moved the needle. 5,500 peak players to 8,300. Before that, season 3 did 6,000 to 12,906. Better, still less than season 5 here. So yeah, good news!
But there are some…caveats here. There’s the issue that Halo has just…never had that many players on Steam at baseline past right at launch when it had 256,619. But they did not stick around for multiplayer, and this 18,000 peak is the closest we’ve been since May 2022, and before that, February 2022 when things really dropped off. It’s like falling off a mountain but you’ve only climbed 10% of the way back up.
The other part of the chart is average players. The peak of May 2022 may have been 21,000 but the average players were 6,400. We have yet to get figures for October since we’re late in the mont here, but they haven’t been over 4,200 since March. We also have no data from the Xbox charts yet. Halo Infinite hangs out at the tail end of the Top 30 most played games on the system at any given time. Right now it’s #27, but these charts always tail a few days, so I do not believe this reflects the season 5 boost. Still, will it hit the top 10? I don’t think that’s a guarantee, which for Xbox’s flagship franchise, should be a given if the series was healthy.
The point here is that yes, Halo Infinite can improved and more than double its current playercount, which is great. But the problem is that its playercount has fallen so low that it may simply never reach the highs that Microsoft was pleased to see right at launch, or the way past Halo games used to be some of the most popular shooters in the world.
I have been very impressed with what 343 has done here, and that’s as a big critic of 343 Halo games and Infinite especially. You should play it, but I do wonder what the overall headline is here if even an excellent season 5 doesn’t cause a huge spike in players, and ones that stick around.
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