Halo: Infinite has continued to disappoint longtime fans of the series since it was released. The ongoing issues with the game have been bubbling over for the last few months. It was enough to warrant a response from 343 Industries community director Brian Jarrad earlier this month who admitted that players were losing patience with the game. That patience seems to be wearing ever thinner as the player count for Halo: Infinite on Steam has now dropped below the eight-year-old Master Chief Collection.
According to SteamDB, at the time of writing Halo: The Master Chief Collection has a 24-hour peak of 9,123 while Halo: Infinite has a 24-hour peak of 7,842. What’s more, is that the average playtime of players for each game on Steam varies wildly. The average playtime for Halo: Infinite players on Steam over the last two weeks is just 42 minutes. Comparatively, The Master Chief Collection has an average two-week playtime of 3.2 hours.
2021 was a bad year for big-budget AAA shooter franchises. Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Halo all had major releases at the end of last year and all of them failed to meet expectations. Call of Duty: Vanguard was the first out of the gate and had some of the worst sales in the history of the franchise. In the UK, one of the strongest Call of Duty territories, Vanguard had the weakest launch since 2007. Battlefield 2042 was released later the same month and now has less than 1000 players on Steam. An unprecedented drop-off for a AAA FPS. Halo: Infinite started off strong but has since been following down the same path as Battlefield 2042, albeit not quite as bad. 343 Industries are scrambling to try and save the game but it won’t be an easy task to bring players back to the game.