Halo: Campaign Evolved officially launched for PC and consoles yesterday, and while sales numbers have not been released for Sony or Xbox, Steam’s are not looking overly impressive. You never know for sure how well a remake will do, which can often incur much higher costs to develop versus a remaster, especially when working with an older title that newer audiences may not have the same interest in as previous generations did. The original Halo: Combat Evolved launched roughly two and a half decades ago, and while it established an iconic franchise, the IP has had its share of ups and downs since.
Halo: Campaign Evolved currently sits in third place on SteamDB’s Popular Releases chart, which technically is a pretty good spot to be on. However, further analysis of various metrics there paints a different picture with other significant details to consider.
- Halo: Campaign appears to be the only AAA title within the top 10, meaning it’s largely competing against lower-priced indie titles.
- Prices for top ten titles range from free up to $29.99, while Halo: Campaign Evolved is priced at $49.99
- 24-hour peak player count is 25,376 vs the number one spot, Scrap Mechanic, which launched only four days before and has 46,643, with a price of $28.99
- The current rating is 67.49%, a not very impressive ranking, with a number of other games in the top ten achieving higher scores in this category
Now, while SteamDB’s charts are not a wholly inclusive means to judge if a game is having a successful release or not, it can often indicate trends. In this regard, PC gamers have shown increased interest in indie games, or AA studio releases, more often than not in the last few years; for instance, look at the epic achievement made with Hollow Knight Silksong. This doesn’t mean that AAA gaming is dead, far from it, since Ubisoft is still celebrating the release of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced and GTA 6 is seemingly on track to break records, but these numbers do show a recurring risk if remaking titles. Hopefully, Microsoft will reveal sales numbers soon so we can get a clearer view of the big picture for this release from its newly formed Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries), who are hoping to develop new games.
Discussion (6 replies)
Join Discussion →Yeah, Steam is a terrible indicator of how well it's doing. Many play on game pass or got the Microsoft store version. Playstation as you noted, further limits the usefulness of Steam's numbers.
On a related note: Something I found out the other day from John of digital foundry, is that XeSS is not supported on any game from the MS store. I like my ARC cards even if they are a box of chocolates. And sometimes it looks better than FSR on AMD and GTX cards. I was mildly surprised to learn it, as the coined term Wintel was with us for decades. Now, not so much.
Still running great until I get to the same specific spot, about 20% into the campaign?
Looks like there's a 3.7GB update, see if that fixes anything.
I'm playing it on PC on game pass myself.
I'd actually be impressed if Microsoft were to port game pass to Steam - same for the others.
Wrong. Steam is an excellent indicator of how games are doing. One could say it is the only reliable indicator as this is the only number that corporations can't astroturf or hide. Remember when ubisoft wanted it gone?
The "oh but think of games pass" excuse was trotted out for indiana jones, avowed, outer world 2, and god knows what other failed games as well. But the fact of the matter is if a game is popular it will do well on steam in spite of being on games pass. Just look at Oblivion Remastered. It was on games pass and still did 200k+ concurrent on steam.
You can bet if Halo struggles on Steam it will be struggling on games pass too.
I agree that Steam's numbers can be a mixed bag, but they do often seem to end up mirroring the industry as a whole, whereas MS will claim successes but then counter itself later on with a "where did the money go" type scenario leading to layoffs. Intel did similar tactics for about a decade, and we know how that went.