| barneystinson69 said: Now Halo has set itself as the figurehead of the xbox brand. Its sold millions, gained untold amount of fans, and is loved and enjoyed by many even today. But with the launch of Halo 5, we saw a bit of a "sag". Sales where down significantly at launch, and many worried the population would die quickly due to the the lack of content at launch (thankfully, this has been fixed and now the game has more than enough content). But its been a bit over a year in, so I've decided to come back and analyze how the game has done so far. Keep in mind lots of this is going to be speculation, so don't take it too seriously Now lets start with sales: Currently Halo 5 is the 4th best selling Xbox One game to date: http://www.vgchartz.com/platform/68/xbox-one/ As of November 12, the game has sold 4.37 million units physically, though given the fact it is December 11th today, and the game has averaged around 60-100k sales per month (its the holiday season, so we should see an uptick), I'm going to assume 4.5 million sales. Now this seems pretty bad for a Halo game, considering ODST sold over 6 million copies: http://www.vgchartz.com/game/29077/halo-3-odst/ However, the 360 never saw the effect of digital sales, so we'll need to take that into account as well. Now estimates say that digital sales on consoles make up anywhere from 20-40% of all video game sales today. I'm going to be a bit conservative, and say that 25% of all Halo 5 sales are digital. That would get us to exactly 6 million (1.5 million digital, 4.5 million physical). Now this could be higher or lower depending on how you look at it, but 25% seems to be a decent baseline to go from. So if we assume that Halo 5 has sold 6 million copies to date, that would beat out the sales of Halo CE and Halo: MCC, but also miss the lifetime sales of Halo 3: ODST and Halo 2. Now Halo games are known to sell millions of copies even years into launch, so Halo 5 could potentially top up 7 million, we'll have to see. But so far, my estimates show the game has sold around 6 million copies, which accounts to around a 23% attach rate (if vgchartz estimates of XB1 sales are correct). Now lets look at the population: Now back in July, we heard all about the fact that Halo 5 had the higest engagement since Halo 3: http://www.inquisitr.com/3287010/halo-5-player-count-increasing-monthly-highest-since-halo-3/ Now I have no idea what they mean by this, so I'm going to have to once again estimate the population. Now I can thank EA for this, as all their games have population counters. Now Battlefield 1 is currently the most played Xbox One game, currently with 117k people online: http://bf1stats.com/ Now the next EA game we can track is SWBF, which is the 25th most played game on the XB1. Currently, its tracking around 22k players on the XB1: http://swbstats.com/ Now of course there are other games in between this, and I know Titanfall 2 (which is 21st) has a population counter, so if anyone has those numbers to share, I'd appreciate it. Halo 5 is currently at 16th place. So the difference between the 1st and 25th most played games is around 95k. This means as we go down a spot, the population decreases by 3.8k. Of course, these estimates show that the 25th most played game would have 25.8k people (vs 22k right now). So I'm going to have to assume a 15% discrepancy. So with the original calculation, it would show Halo 5 had around 60k active players right now, of course we'll have to make up for that discrepancy, and say there is a 15% decrease on top of that. So that means Halo 5 has 51k active players right now. If we're to do comparisons, Halo 4 was peaking around 20k by the end of its first year at release (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=709697). I also need to mention Halo 4 sold around 40% more than Halo 5, so the trends show Halo 5 is doing far better at maintaining a population, even with so many shooters in the market at this time of year. This is about how far I'm going to dig into things. If people want to continue to do so, I encourage all forms of discussion (so long has it doesn't get out of hand). I'll also be posting a reply to people who don't want to read a big wall of text. |
First off, as someone who takes pride in creative writing, you use way too many "nows" lol. Just some friendlty advice. Secondly, I think Halo losing Bungie is the issue. For all the talk about Halo 4's SP being so good, it's MP dried up overnight. That never happened under Bungie's reign.
I honestly don't think Halo will ever return to what made it great until Bungie comes back to work on it and/or the people invovled with the first three games take over control. 343 did as good a job as they could but it just isn't enough. Microsoft needs to pay Bungie whatever the hell they want, along with creative control etc. if they want to revive the series.
