Halo Infinite lost 98% of its players on Steam since release

This whole thing is especially heartbreaking because at its core, the game is great. Running around and shooting feels better then Halo has in a long time. It was just ruined by corporate fuckery.

I'm a bit out of the loop.. what corporate fuckery?
- Amazing core gameplay, but a lack of content. The game was pushed as a half-assed live service game, but they never released content at anything close to a live service rate. Coupled with pretty horrendous progression/aggressive MTX pricing at the start, and well...
- 343 has never been good at managing a Halo game. Not sure what OP is referring to specifically but 343 has made tons of awful decisions with the franchise. One thing that always bothered me with infinite is from what I remember the game has an enormous amount of tech debt because Microsoft loves to hire temporary contract workers so by the time a new contractor was hired and brought up to speed on the new engine they were developing/had developed, they barely had time to do much before having to be replaced with another contractor, which makes me feel awful for the poor developers hired on these temp contracts.
- In this case, 343 management (since replaced) used 18-month contractors to perform the engine overhaul and build the game across the several years it was in development in order to save a buck, which in turn meant there were countless holes in engine knowledge and the engine was spaghetti code. That resulted in unfinished tools for months after launch and slow game development as a result, as well as major desync issues where you could be in an entirely different area on your screen than you were according to the server. The monetization and FOMO was also off the rails, with absurdly difficult and annoying weekly challenges that were necessary to grind the battlepass and unlock anything for free. Basic color sliders were taken away in favor of "armor coatings," and as such, to date I still cannot recreate my Halo Reach Spartan even though I have all the armor pieces necessary thanks to the Season 1 battlepass (which is the only battlepass I own, since I bought it during the honeymoon period and it doesn't contain any credits to buy the next battlepass). They did successfully commit to having battlepasses that don't expire, but only if you paid for it, otherwise it still expires and this was only mentioned for the first time like a week before Season 2.
  
  The list kinda goes on and on, but the tl;dr is that devs and players alike both got hyper-fucked by Bonnie Ross.
- In a nutshell: corporate greed. The only part of the game that was live service was the paid cosmetics.
  
  At launch, their entire idea of more ‘content’ was just visual cosmetics. If you look at their communications at the time it will all make sense.
  
  They constantly referred to an internal ‘live service’ team separate from the rest of the game, and that team was effectively the ‘cosmetics team’.
  
  People talk about contractors, but this was the real problem. They thought they could get away with barely adding any real content and selling tons of cosmetics.
It's so sad because the base gameplay is fantastic, but the way 343 chose to do playlists with so few weapons, maps, and game modes available it absolutely killed the game.
- Also the fact that campaign wasn't even available on launch. I was pretty excited for some co-op campaign but never even went back after they implemented it months later.

I wanted to like this game so much. :(

There's a lot going on around Infinite and Halo/343 as a whole that makes titles and articles like these really difficult to understand and have an honest discussion around. Even though not many people play on Steam, there are other ways to play it on PC and Infinite is still the 6th-most played game on Gamepass, with it still being relatively popular on its main platform - Xbox. At the same time, though, there are some long-standing and glaring issues with 343's Halo, and it's not terribly surprising that Infinite didn't end up capturing and retaining the playerbase it maybe ought to have.

On one side, people in the gaming community (and the Halo community) eat up articles that go "XYZ game is DEAD because-" as it allows some pretty easy grandstanding and attention (or over on reddit/twitter, imaginary internet points farming). For the most part, Infinite is in a pretty okay state in terms of content (after 1.5 years) and player levels, and an article like this one is easy rage-bait for people to interact with.

On the other side, it's not terribly surprising that this happened. Before Infinite, I would argue that all of 343's games were resounding flops - not monetarily, they all sold well, but in terms of quickly diminishing playercounts, negative reactions from the community, meager launch content, or even flat-out not working (looking at the initial launch of MCC), 343 had yet to hit a homerun with Halo. The first few weeks of Infinite were great, but the cracks started to show quickly. Bugfixes were non-existent - such as when the BTB playlist broke in December and it took 2 months for 343 to fix it. Content delivery was also non-existent, the game shipping with very few modes and maps with the supposed 3-month seasons being delayed into being 6 to 9 months long, with the bulk of updates being for cosmetic content or modes that had been there on launch-day for other Halo titles. The challenge and cosmetic systems were explicitly frustrating and designed to be so, under the pretense of making people grind/play more, but which ended up having the exact opposite effect and drove players away. Shop and cosmetic prices were ludicrous, and there was no consistent stat or rank-tracking systems. No Forge. No custom games browser. Theater doesn't work. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Even though Infinite is in a decent spot now and I find it fun to play, it's not surprising at all that the playerbase is at levels lower than it should be. No, Infinite or Halo aren't "dead," but 343 has done a good job at whittling down a titan of a franchise into a middling AA-level game that only the most die-hard fans care much about.

This is a pretty good, nuanced take at the current state of Infinite. There’s a lot they’re to like, but it’s been hampered by a poor execution. It seems like they’ve started to hit a good stride with S4.
- Yeah, there's unfortunately very little room for nuanced takes with Halo. It's either one extreme of "343 killed my dog" or the other extreme of "343 literally cannot do any wrong."
  
  There's a lot I enjoy about Infinite, I even had a great time playing a few matches today with a friend. The art direction and sound design is superb. The gameplay feels like a great iteration on the original games while still having modern sensibilities to it. New weapons and equipment manage to fill both traditional and new roles without being too out of place or boring. Maps are all generally good to great. The frequency and types of content/updates since Season 3 have been what Infinite needed from the beginning.
  
  At the same time, like I listed in my previous comment, there were some huge issues that took arguably too long to be resolved. I'm glad the game is in a good spot now and I truly enjoy it, I just find it to be a shame as if the game launched in the state it is now, Halo may have seen quite the revitalization.

I play on steam and have a blast still. It's a great feeling and playing game. It is extremely lacking in the earnable cosmetics and no firefight still. But everything else has been added granet should have been there from the start but here we are.

I'm not really surprised. I feel like Halo has been losing steam for a while and Infinite had the vibe of the devs doing everything popular because it makes money not because they had an awesome idea.

This right here. I think the popularity of Battlebit proves this point. If devs make a game that they themselves would want to play, they create a great game. If the game is made via committee and how much profits the suits can squeeze out of it there is a good chance the game sucks.
While that's self-evidently true for some of Infinite, Halo also actively avoided a lot of the dark patterns that would've kept people playing. It was, unfortunately, kind of the worst of both worlds. The battle passes stick around forever, events repeat, almost all externally-advertised cosmetics were free. It's supposed to be a system that works for the players, and it more or less does (in comparison to, say, Fortnite), but it also means that you don't have a reason to sign back in every single day and grind through something to get enough currency to buy the new skin you like, and most people aren't financially investing themself much in playing it.

They kept breaking the game on steam deck every release to the point that I and many others stopped caring also battle passes and FOMO tactics... I play it occasionally but the story has always been the draw for me. Now they are just changing the story every game.

Game play itself is OK but every game starting with halo 4 has had a terrible plot because they won't commit to a story.

This was my issue. I really enjoyed the campaign but I kept trying to play multiplayer on my Deck and it wouldn't work, or I would have to come up with some weird workaround and then it wouldn't work later.
I thought Halo 4 had a good story. They shouldn't have teased the Didact at the end if they weren't going to keep him in Halo 5.

Halo 5's overall plot was a fine continuation of the Prometheans. Unfortunately 2/3 of the game was "follow John". But the Guardians were a cool stand-in for the rings and evil-Cortana was beyond formidable. It set up a lot of stuff to be epic in Halo 6.

Halo Infinite was just poopy.
At least Infinite's battle pass system doesn't have FOMO, because paid battle passes don't expire, and you can buy old battle passes at any time. Starting with Season 2, battle passes give back enough credits to buy the next battle pass, which means you only need to buy 2 battle passes to have full access to every battle pass.

All the FOMO is in the events (limited time mini battle passes) and weekly rewards.
- Correct me if I'm wrong or if they've changed this. But don't you get a double experience (not sure the term they use) boost with the current battle pass? So, playing older battle passes without the current pass means slower progress.
  
  At least it's not locked out, but still crappy FOMO tactics.

I don't know why people feel surprised xyz game lost 99% of it's playerbase. Yeah, that shit happens to literally every single game, only really freaking popular games like Fortnite or Apex Legends maintain a solid playerbase for years, people will get tired of most games and move on after a while. In fact, I'd be surprised only if Infinite somehow still maintained a really big playerbase since release.

The claim was that all Halo content for the next decade would be released as updates to Infinite rather than separate games, and past Halo games that haven't been supposedly kept fresh with new content haven't had a drop-off this aggressive. There used to be plenty of people who'd mostly play whatever the latest Halo game was, but they're clearly not playing Infinite.
Halo was a legit competitor to cod just past a decade ago.

Now you can’t even compare them because COD is bigger than ever while halo is a shadow of its former self.

Infinite really could have been a partial comeback for halo if they had a steady stream of content after launch, but somehow they added even less than most non-live service games.
I think specifically in the case of Halo, the surprise is because it was such a powerhouse of a franchise in the 2000s into early 2010s. Halo was the Fortnite and Apex Legends before Fortnite and Apex Legends in terms of player retention.

Halo 2 and 3 had thriving playerbases for years after release. Infinite came out just over 1.5 years ago and has already lost almost all of its players. The Master Chief Collection currently has more players than Infinite with 5,200 to Infinite's 3,000 on Steam.

I spent countless hours in high school playing Halo 3, and even a few years after release, you'd have hundreds of thousands of players online. Two years after release in October 2009, Halo 3 had close to 759,000 players online in the span of 24 hours, plus about 129,000 playing ODST, which had just come out a month prior.

I'm not a fan of gaming as a service, but it clearly can be a successful business model for sustained success, so you'd think that one of the most iconic gaming franchises of all time would be able to harness that.

I think it's worth mentioning the most of players of Infinite don't play it through steam but rather through gamepass on PC

The vast majority of players are also on Xbox, Steam metrics are a pretty terrible view in this instance

That's overall numbers, not percentage. It's reasonable to assume those other ways of buying/playing it have dropped off similarly.
- Sure but Online dropped first for free so people were happy to pick it up on Steam
  
  The campaign release was later and was included within GamePass so people made the switch then, in fact there was a large drop in Steam numbers the month after the release of Campaign likely due to people swapping over to GamePass
  
  I'm not denying a loss in player count across all services, that absolutely has happened (and to a degree is expected to happen no game maintains the peak players) i'm saying that Steam metrics are very poor for tracking Microsoft releases
  
  Sea of thieves has lost around 66% of average players compared to 2020 on Steam despite the fact it actually has a much larger active player count now (Though of course less than the 2021 peak)

The game feels so hollow, like it's only job is for you to unlock cosmetics.

Really sad. I managed to reach Onyx rank but the FOMO was real (even though they said there would be no FOMO).

The gameplay was actually really good, but the busy-work to complete challenges ruined the experience for me.

When playing a competitive shooter, the top priority should be winning. When I need to remember to kill three enemies with the shock rifle, run over five people, tea-bag my own teammate and get a 360 no-scope with my finger in my ass, I'm not thinking about winning or playing how I want.

Also 343 were just cunts about everything the entire time.

I knew Infinite would be shit when they started that whole thing about armour coatings and whatnot.

Customising your Spartan has been a key of the games for years. To slap that behind a paywall is (in my eyes) totally unforgivable.

Maybe unpopular opinion... Should Halo invert its focus? Currently it's multiplayer first, singeplayer second. If the multiplayer modes cannot maintain a playerbase then its not going to be a main driver of success. The battle royale and hero shooter crazes haven't left much room for the Halo multiplayer format to succeed these days: most of the potential players are focusing on something else.

I think if they could deliver kickass campaigns consistently that they could keep Halo as a successful franchise. If they keep chasing multiplayer it'll fade into obscurity soon enough.

This was the plan initially, then they fired everyone :(

I just wanted more PvE :( There is still nothing more to do at all once you have don the campaign, not even worthwhile cosmetics...