Halo Infinite was released last December to acclaim from critics and fans alike, including Brendan’s review here at RPS. On Twitch, it reached a peak of over 200k viewers. Many content creators, such as ‘KevinKoolx’, had their best month ever in terms of YouTube and Twitch engagement in December. After a decade of polarizing releases, Halo was back. It’s difficult to overstate how impressive this achievement was, given that the Halo fanbase is almost as divided as the Star Wars fanbase – a seemingly minor issue like sprint inclusion is just one of many decade-long squabbles.
343 Industries managed to create an experience that almost every type of Halo fan could get behind with Halo Infinite. However, only four months after its launch, Infinite is having trouble retaining its player base.
Twitch peaks are now below 10,000 and falling, with averages even lower. According to Lynch, February was his worst month in terms of viewership in over a year. You’d expect some drop-off after a game’s launch, but every content creator agrees that Infinite’s engagement is abnormally low for a live service game at the start of its multi-year journey, especially for a franchise as big as this.
While standard series features are missing, Infinite hasn’t added any new playable content in the four months since its launch. The mid-season update was more akin to a week one patch than the kind of content drop that other live-service games receive in terms of maps, modes, and weapons.
On February 1st, director Joseph Staten said the team needed “more time to finalize plans” after promising players a content roadmap in January. The roadmap is still missing, but 343 has announced their next season, Lone Wolves, which will be released on May 3rd and will include one new Arena map, one new Big Team Battle map, three new modes, and, of course, a season pass.
Content creators like Arrrash are skeptical that 343’s plans will change the game’s current state.
What can 343 do if fixing features and adding maps/modes aren’t enough? Forge mode is a long-running series feature that allows players to edit maps and create unique game modes.
Forge has been used by fans to create some truly amazing content, such as remakes of old Halo maps and maps from other classic games like Goldeneye. They’ve created some of the most chaotic modes, such as a Wipeout stage and stages where players must dodge avalanche-sized snowballs.
343 used Forged Big Team Battle maps in Halo 5, rather than 343-developed ones, because the community was so good at creating content in Forge.
Forge has the potential to be a huge help to Halo Infinite. It’s a never-ending source of content. It can provide an infinite number of new modes to play for the playerbase, and content creators will have no trouble finding interesting, silly content to stream. Of course, 343 cannot simply release a Forge mode and call it a day. Forge needs to work well in terms of discoverability and file sharing in order to have a significant impact on Infinite’s player base but, as of now, Forge mode is set to debut during Halo Infinite’s third season, which is set to release in August.
Many of the bigger Halo YouTubers are working on new projects, such as Hrebinka, who recently made some Call Of Duty videos and streamed Elden Ring.
Halo is a multifaceted game. It’s Microsoft’s golden goose, a series of epic campaigns, a story of tragic Spartans and ‘effed up AI romance but, above all, Halo is a digital space where a community of people has been anchored for two decades. After the studio announced MCC would be coming to PC, they banded together to flood the 343 offices with pizza. Master Chief saying “Trans Rights” has been edited into multiple Halo cutscenes.
It’s a place where siblings have made friends and put their differences aside for the sake of killing scary alien monkeys in space. The drop in engagement will supposedly hurt 343 and Microsoft, but it will have the greatest impact on the people who have been brought together by this legendary series. At the very least, the developers appear to be aware of player dissatisfaction. We’ll have to wait and see what Season Two has in store.
