Xbox May Want To Stop Ignoring ‘Halo Infinite,’ Which Is Good Now

While we know Xbox is caught up in all its fun new toys between Bethesda’s Starfield launch and its pinata of Activision Blizzard games it’s about to have access to, it feels like it’s time to mount some sort of coordinated campaign for poor Halo Infinite again.

Yes, we all know how things started. Most people thought that campaign was pretty good (I didn’t), but it became immediately apparently that 343 really did not know how to craft or execute Halo as a live service multiplayer title early on.

But ever since launch, 343 has been working tirelessly to figure it out and now they…have. They really have managed to turn around at least the multiplayer portion of the game in a huge way (RIP Master Chief himself, who might be limited to Paramount Plus TV appearances now).

We are now about to hit season 5 of Halo Infinite which looks shockingly good, after a series of increasingly solid seasons before it. The “Reckoning” season launches in a week, includes requested features like AI in Forge, new Flood customization, Master Chief reward armor and most importantly the return of Firefight to the Halo series.

It’s all great stuff, adding on to a few seasons of great stuff now. But…it hasn’t been enough to significantly move the needle.

While things will go up a bit during season launch, the trendline has been pretty poor. Not enough people are giving the game a second chance. At the time of this writing it’s only the 30th most played game on Xbox itself. It only has 5-6,000 concurrent Steam players at any given time, and even around season launches, that only goes up to 8-12,000.

Microsoft has routinely left Halo out of presentations as of late (it was not mentioned once in the big 2023 summer showcase this year), and this feels like a mistake. Not to go all “Cyberpunk” here, but yes, it really does seem worthwhile for Microsoft to stop being drunk off its acquisition spree for a minute and refocus on what at least used to be its flagship franchise here.

343 deserves more support than it’s been getting (what it’s been getting is mostly layoffs) and Halo Infinite deserves another look after all these improvements. But unless Microsoft is doing the work to help get the word out, I’m not sure what else can be done. And even then, it may just be too late as we are five seasons and two years into the launch of the game, and with so many other multiplayer shooter options, it may be a hard sell no matter the marketing budget. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and all that.

But yes, Xbox should at least be trying more than we’ve seen. The multiplayer has come a long way even if all single player content appears to be on ice indefinitely. I’d love to see an actual playercount turnaround, but no matter how many improvements are made, I’m just not sure if that’s in the cards.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.