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Edited by Double Eagle 30:
6/6/2013 3:25:57 AM
57
The Fall of Halo 4 and the Rise of Destiny .... Online Population Decline & The Ghost of Christmas Future
I felt the need to make a few marketing related comments over on the 343 Forum and got banned until March 29th 4571. Got to love it. :-)
In marketing the initial boost of sales called an inaugural sales spike that appears when an anticipated product hits the market gives the surface impression that its doing well but the retention rate is everything. When you look at the online populations for Reach after being out two years and then look at how fast Halo 4s online player count is dropping its obvious that Halo Reach was a much stronger game. In fact if you superimpose the deterioration curve of the previous Halo issues on where Halo 4 is now then its going to fall to a baseline way short of Reach. This IS a problem. The millions of copies of Halo 4 that sold last November were due to market expectation not the product itself.
Halo 5 is in very serious trouble because the all important retention rate (or lack thereof) reflects long term hard core interest by the base that shows up in the form of demand on the next release cycle. Online activity for Halo 4 has crashed so hard its just hard to believe and we may find that the fraction of base line player counts lost will match what Halo 5 ends up losing in inaugural sales when the new game comes out. Think in terms of a 25-40% loss in sales compared to Halo 4.
As a long time Halo player that purchased Halo 1,2,3,ODST,Reach and 4 the day they came out I must confess when I play Halo 4 I go around annoyed all the time because of the random aspects of the weapons placement on the maps and the random aspects of the ordinance drops among other things. These are the same reasons the game was dumped by Major League Gaming according to Forbes.
The people that I know that have been long time Halo nuts (myself included) are very much looking forward to Destiny because they think it is the expression of what Bungie would have done with Halo if they had been give a free hand. The Halo fan bases still exists and it showed up less that 6 months ago but next time the tsunami of demand that these players produce is likely to show up on Destiny not Halo 5.
References: http://www.halocharts.com/2012/chart/totalpopulation/all
http://majornelson.com/2013/05/01/live-activity-for-week-of-april-22nd/
http://www.gamespot.com/news/halo-4-playtime-fell-below-halo-reach-despite-more-content-6409214
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2 RepliesVery true. I've been in since the beginning. The original trilogy and Reach are still my favorite games to date. But 343 really -blam!-ed up. As a long time Halo fan, it really saddens me that I just can't play the newest installment. Halo 4, at it's very core, is a casualized easy game. Even without it's gimmicks, I can't stand the game. So much aim assist and bullet magnetism, and the worst part is, 343 openly admitted at GDC that they WANTED to make the game easier and more random. But that's enough of that. MLG dropped Halo 4 and the population dwindles by the day. The game is dying. You can argue that it's not, but in my eyes, Halo is done. I most likely will not be buying Microsoft's newest console, which means no Halo 5 for me. On the topic of Destiny though, I really believe in Bungie. I know their hearts are in this game. They're very talented individuals, each and every one of them, and I know they're going to bring us the new Halo CE. The new game of the decade.
