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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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1 ReplyBeen a Bungie fan since Pathways Into Darkness. They had their ups and downs with Halo (I have been and always will be sharply critical of Halo 2's letdown of a campaign after the huge buildup of Halo 1, for example)... but overall they were good stewards of the series and took it in good directions, both in campaign and multiplayer. Halo: Reach IMO was a great sendoff. I had really high hopes for Halo 4, but the MP is not at all what Halo used to be, and unleashing the talentless cliché factory that produced Halo 4's campaign has all but buried my interest in Halo's storyline. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Bungie fanboy, I completely believed Halo could survive and thrive under new direction. But the new direction Halo got, is not it. Sort of like Alien/Aliens... first two films were magnificent, but then the series got driven off a cliff and hasn't come back. Not only that, but 343 even reached back into Bungie's backyard and took the excellent state Bungie left Reach's multiplayer in (especially Firefight, the Limited version of which had ended up becoming my favorite mode) and just ran a dump truck over it. Sad to say, with the exception of occasionally playing Spartan Ops with friends, Halo is pretty much over for me after Halo 4. What you're saying with regards to the population proves to me that I'm not the only one who felt that way.
