When Halo 3 was out, there were about 3 games worth playing online - let alone total for the system. Early in the lifecycle, and it was THE game.

Halo 4's lower player total daily isn't about the game. It's about choice. There are currently 952 Xbox 360 titles, and 536 XBLA titles.

That's 1500 games to compete with. And that's just on the one platform.

So if there's 50 million Live users, and maybe 60% are Gold members, that's 30 million players. Let's say only HALF the total titles are viable (some are so old and crappy no one is playing them.) 30 million divided by 750 games is 40,000 users. So IF EVERY gold user played a game EVERY night, then 40,000 per title would be expected. But of course that's totally unrealistic.

The fact that Halo 4 has the number of users it HAS off 8 million sales is remarkable - - not tragic. Some of your expectations are quite sad.

You bring up a thread that got 42 replies (made by less than 42 members) to prove a point that "most" Halo fans agree with you ?
On top of that a forum that is almost exclusively reporting about Minecraft and Destiny ?
http://www.343industries.org/news


OT: Who cares ? Over 8m bought the game (easily over 10m at the end with Games on Demand and future sales). They got the money from that. Sure they won't sell as much DLC but compared to the initial game profits that's almost peanuts. On the other hand they don't need to spend as much money on servers...

How is Halo complicated? Maybe I'm biased as I've played it for so long but don't see it as complicated at all. If you want complicated, try Battlefield. I would'nt call it a flop, its still immensly popular. Its just other games have overtaken it.

Skills games aren't bad, butif you don't give players a decent oppourtunity to learn most will give up very quickly. Battlefield drives me insane in that players dominate games in vehicles (and there is no effective way to take them down) but if you get in the driver/pilot seat to try and practice you will be blown up almost instantly even if you manage not to crash. If why Im often stuck playing Team Deatmatch.

The only reasonable way you could call MP a flop is if Halo 4 had substantially less amount of individuals playing online at the same time period compared to previous iterations of the franchise. These charts don't actually show exactly how many people are playing the game. So given the Halo 4 sales figures, I think it's more of a case of COD, Fifa and Minecraft being much bigger franchises than Halo, rather than Halo 4 being a flop.

Dude it is infinitely better on PC.  Intel 3000 can run it, so almost any laptop on earth can handle it.  Honestly only an Intel Atom would fail to run it well...

I know exactly what you mean. The learning curve for BF is very steep. Skilled players completely dominate the noobs.

That isn't a bad thing because that is how it should be. I play fighting games where the learning curves are even steeper and you will get raped if you go in PVP without extensive practice. But in fighting games at least I can sit down in very detailed training modes and beat on some dummy for hours and learn all the combos, etc before I try out against other humans. The training modes are very comprehensive that let you tweak all kinds of options and also shows you how to perform combos.

There is no such training option in BF and to top it off there is no skilled based matchmaking as far as I know. Also BF is a team based game mostly and I don't have a huge party who play the game to roll with. All in all the experience just pushes me off the game.

People constantly complain about how games don't require skills, but I think it's equally bad for a game if it just drops people in the deep end and doesn't take the time to teach them the intricacies and providing a ground to hone their skills.

True except if you like to play it split screen with friends, who don't necessarily have to buy the game then.

Why hasn't this thread been locked? The OP already admitted to using misleading hyperbole in the title.

And that's what annoy me the most. Not so much getting riped to shreads by the pros but there not being an effective way for me to learn how to take them on. Its seems to be another shoddy practice by EA (this time in terms of lazy developing rather than questionable money-making techniques), I have the same problem with things like free-kicks in fifa.

I think you underestimate how much people like skill ranking systems like Halo 3 had. A ranking system was by far the most requested feature in Halo 4 and they really should have added it in from the get go.

Also I gotta point out that the 50 skill rank system that they are adding in is kind of pointless because you won't be able to see your rank unless you go to Halo Waypoint. Half the point of ranking systems is to display them to the world in game. Also I don't think they are even adding in specific ranked playlists. Don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing though.