I think it's fair to say this game is pretty much dead on Steam; peak concurrent players barely cracked 10K, regular concurrent is somewhere around 6K-7K. Even Forza Horizon 4 is pulling higher concurrent players than Halo Infinite. As for Xbox player counts, we don't have any official numbers, but you'd think their marquee IP would be in at least the Top 3. It's not even in the Top 10 anymore.
Here's the current Steam Top 20:
| Name | Current Players | Last 30 Days | Peak Players | Hours Played |
---|
1. | Lost Ark | 778,525 | | 1,324,761 | 263,815,365 |
2. | Counter-Strike: Global Offensive | 757,370 | | 989,573 | 471,817,887 |
3. | Dota 2 | 656,824 | | 733,941 | 336,106,632 |
4. | PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS | 301,768 | | 532,109 | 180,797,509 |
5. | Apex Legends | 250,444 | | 392,998 | 141,539,667 |
6. | Destiny 2 | 142,182 | | 289,895 | 44,335,695 |
7. | Grand Theft Auto V | 105,104 | | 155,111 | 68,665,374 |
8. | Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel | 84,255 | | 240,810 | 76,809,939 |
9. | Rust | 83,287 | | 164,990 | 64,354,916 |
10. | Team Fortress 2 | 75,371 | | 93,238 | 50,795,241 |
11. | NARAKA: BLADEPOINT | 72,931 | | 143,028 | 38,329,773 |
12. | Wallpaper Engine | 66,236 | | 88,349 | 41,681,004 |
13. | FIFA 22 | 60,871 | | 89,499 | 31,751,928 |
14. | MIR4 | 59,405 | | 62,580 | 41,109,786 |
15. | Football Manager 2022 | 54,777 | | 84,102 | 36,716,258 |
16. | Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege | 50,075 | | 78,263 | 32,331,642 |
17. | ARK: Survival Evolved | 49,289 | | 87,690 | 38,829,059 |
18. | Total War: WARHAMMER III | 48,534 | | 166,519 | 16,755,357 |
19. | Path of Exile | 43,596 | | 158,140 | 30,274,113 |
20. | Sid Meier's Civilization VI | | | | |
Meanwhile, Halo Infinite is at #128 with 6,191 concurrent players (and for further reference, Forza Horizon 5 currently has 10,975 concurrent players). I can't think of a scenario where one can say Halo Infinite is a
genuine success: they got the core gameplay mechanics solidified and polished very well, but there's very little to do with them. The game seems severely content-starved and that's a death knell for a live service game.
Lack of a confirmed roadmap is also hurting it, they should probably get on that ASAP. But this might also be a wake-up call for Microsoft to finally really clean up 343i, because there's no reason the game should've released as it did even after a full year's delay. I honestly think the future of this IP lies in the hands of one of the other FPS houses they have (iD, Obsidian (New Vegas), Bethesda (Fallout), Infinity Ward, Treyarch etc.), with only a core subset of 343i talent involved (including Joseph Staten). Meanwhile maybe the rest of 343i gets retooled as a support studio for other teams and just do bulk content generation for future Halo games.
I simply can't see 343i spearheading the development of future Halo games any further, it's probably time to change it up.
The core gameplay loop for multiplayer is arguably the strongest Halo's ever been in that regard. But a live service game needs a lot more than that to retain the majority of its players.
And there are issues with Halo Infinite's BattlePass and progression system making even a lot of core fans upset and dropping out, that's a legitimate problem. The sooner they fix that and the lack of content, the sooner the game can get back a healthy playerbase, the type you'd expect for a marquee FPS that should be leading the pack or among the leaders of the pack.
Right now Halo Infinite is almost an also-ran in comparison to the Apex Legends, Destiny 2, VALORANT, etc, at least on PC. Even on Xbox, it's lost a lot of player retention and given player retention is a metric Microsoft values highly, they probably aren't particularly happy about it.