Ok it’s time to address the elephant in the room. We’ve all noticed it, and it’s starting to make the rounds on the Halo Reddit and Halowaypoint Forums: the player base on Halo Reach PC has been dropping.
Halo Reach PC: Peak Steam Active Players
Halo Reach PC got out to a blistering speed out of the gate. According to SteamCharts Halo: The Master Chief Collection had a peak of 93,305 concurrent users playing on Dec 6th, and this does not take into account all the Windows players not on Steam. For those who have forgotten Halo Reach PC was released on Dec 3rd 2019. The peak user count is truly a remarkable figure that nobody really could have predicted.
Halo Reach PC: Sharp Player Decline
Since the peak on Dec 6th the player base took a sharp decline. After just one week of release the player base was 1/3 of its all-time highs. Things have not been much better since but we remain hopeful they stabilize. On January 11th we had 12,621 peak Steam Halo Reach PC players, whereas on January 21st there was 7,508. At this rate there may not be many left standing in another month.
Fortunately there is some hope on the horizon: Halo CE is expected to release in February. This almost certainly will bring players back to Halo: The Master Chief Collection PC, and likely some of those players will split time between those two titles.
Halo Searches on Google
As we can see from Google Trends interest in Halo spikes during any announcement and the amount of searches leading days up the release of Halo Reach PC hit the chart maximum. Additionally the interest has not completely dropped off to the pre-Halo Reach PC time. So while the player base may be dropping for now, interest is still elevated with players waiting on the sidelines to come back.
Halo Infinite Player Base
We truly hope the player situation in Halo Reach PC isn’t foreshadowing things to come with Halo Infinite. We believe the end result will be quite to the contrary where each release of Halo The Master Chief Collection builds on the player base which ultimately leads to a highly successful launch. Lets remember that this is the premier product launch of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and the success of it and Halo are very much tied together.