Halo Infinite Has Lost Most Of Its Steam Playerbase

Halo Infinite launched in 2021 and it received positive reception when it came out. Over time, fans became upset with a lack...

The honeymoon phase for Halo Infinite has been over for quite some time, it seems.

Halo Infinite launched in 2021 and it received positive reception when it came out. Over time, fans became upset with a lack of content updates, cancellation of certain promises, and bad community management. As a result, the game's free-to-play live service multiplayer has lost almost all of their player-base on Steam.

SteamDB Data Shows Halo Infinite Has Lost 98% of Its Playerbase

SteamDB is a third-party website tracks player counts among Steam games. The data is updated for all games every 10 minutes (with the top 800 being updated every 5 minutes). It also tells you the all-time peak amount of players in a game's history. For reference, Halo Infinite had an all-time high population of 272,586 when the multiplayer beta launched on November 11th, 2021. In just two weeks they had over 180,000 on November 25th.

Fast Forward to June 22nd, 2023, where the player count was a measly 7,012. In fact, at the time of writing this article, the 24-hour peak player count was 6,319. Thats a 98% decrease since the game's launch. In terms of 24-hour peak data, Halo Infinite currently ranks at 178 on SteamDB's charts.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which launched in 2019 on Steam, has a 24-hour peak of 8,327 (#144). That game originally launched in 2014, and is still surpassing Infinite. It's never a good sign when fans prefer to play the older titles over your recent installment.

You can check the data for yourself here.

What Does This Mean For Halo?

Part of the player drop is understandable. The game did release over a year and a half ago. In a day and age where there's multiple multiplayer games, mobile games, and gaming services flooding the market, it's tough for many games to stay relevant for years. With Call of Duty, Fortnite, Destiny, and other gaming experiences at the top, Halo has struggled as a franchise to re-assert the dominance it had in the early 2000s.

Additionally, most players are playing Halo on Xbox, so looking at Steam numbers alone isn't always the greatest indicator. However, it does raise questions on how 343's live service multiplayer is performing compared to other online multiplayer games. There's no exact way to see how many players are on Halo Infinite on Xbox. Perhaps that's a blessing for 343 Industries.

However, the drop in player counts is still concerning. Just look at Destiny 2, a game that came out back in 2017. The game currently has a 24-hour peak of 56,094 on Steam. So if a game from almost six-years ago can do well, why can't Microsoft flagship's franchise from less than two years ago do the same?

Some fans were hoping the addition of Forge and Infection Modes would bring players back to the series. That doesn't seem to be the case quite yet. Every Season has been lacking in content too. All season 4 added beyond Infection was two new maps, some new equipment and customization options, and that's about it. Outside of Infection and Forge, every update in Halo infinite has felt bare bones.

It's crazy to think that Halo, one of Microsoft's original flagship franchises, has struggled to stay afloat in recent years. We don't think this spells the end of the series, but with bigger sci-fi projects like Starfield on the horizon, it seems Halo will be taking a backseat as a franchise.

Conclusion

At this point we can only hope for the future of Halo to be a bright one. Since 343i took over the series over a decade ago, there's been nothing but mixed reception over their games. Halo 4 took out dual wielding and playable elites. Halo 5 removed Chief almost entirely and told a story written by people who Hate Halo. Infinite couldn't deliver on some features and had to delay Forge for almost a year after the game released.

Instead, 343 Industries implemented microtransactions which are still negatively received. They had to cancel couch co-op play, cancel all story DLC, and abandon Season narrative cutscenes. In other words, 343 Industries has failed to keep a core fanbase by being unable to deliver what were day-one features on previous entries.

We hate to say it, but we've reached the Dark Age of Halo.

Halo Infinite's multiplayer is still free to play for anyone interested, with the campaign experience sold separately. The game is available for Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One (Including Game Pass Members). The multiplayer released on November 15th, 2021, with the Campaign releasing on December 8th that same year.

For more information on Halo Infinite, like the newly released Season 4, check out ClutchPoints Gaming.