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Destiny

Discuss all things Destiny.
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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  • gosh i feel bad for everyone at 343, its not looking to good for them. I like halo 4 and i suppose the only thing keeping me from going back to reach is the fact that reach is broken, (disk is scratched). anyway i think halo 4 was my last halo game and ill be sticking with bungie. i hope people don't heighten their expectations because bungie is making this. if people don't get what they want id hate to see bungie get hurt because of it.

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