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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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This probably won't be the most popular opinion, but for me ultimately Halo's downfall could [i]potentially[/i] be itself. It's a game that sticks to very strict rules as to what is and isn't "Halo". Plus, it has a (sometimes fanatical) competitive community around it that have all but dug a moat and built a wall around it. They have dug in and entrenched themselves into EVERY aspect of Halo [i]should be.[/i] Whether Halo collectively realizes it or not, they are turning into a game with waters so deep that it's a turn-off to a large enough percentage of new gamers that they might as well consider themselves elitist. Elitism isn't a good way to win over new fans. But neither is pandering to the opposite side. 343i tries to do both at the same time without the finesse to make it seamless.
