Halo Infinite: Xbox player count continues to impress despite Steam slump (trueachievements.com)
Halo Infinite’s Steam player base might have taken a nosedive according to reports that emerged over the weekend, but those figures don’t tell the full story — our own Xbox data suggests the game is still going strong two months after its full release.
For our regular Gameplay Chart, we track around 2.5 million active Xbox accounts to find out which are the most-played games of each week. Sure, it’s far from the full Xbox player base, but it’s still comfortably a large enough sample size to get an accurate cross-section of what people have been playing. Contrary to those plummeting Steam numbers — the game has dropped from a concurrent peak of over 260,000 to below 10,000 players at the time of writing — our data from the last week actually shows a very slight increase in Halo Infinite’s Xbox player base, with more than 10% of all tracked Xbox accounts having played Infinite in the last seven days.
Granted, Infinite’s player percentage has dropped off substantially since late last year, with around 25% of tracked players firing up the game in the week its free-to-play multiplayer launched in beta and an extremely impressive 30% of tracked players getting involved in Infinite’s full launch week.
With the first big content drop still three months away, we have little doubt that Infinite’s numbers will fall off somewhat as players wrap up the campaign and start to tire of the multiplayer component’s minimal map selection, slow progression, and ongoing issues. Right now, though, our data paints a picture of a game in rude health and one with more staying power than any of its recent or relevant peers, and each and every major update will inevitably bring back many lapsed players to give the user base another much-needed boost. Infinite shows absolutely no signs of relinquishing its spot as one of the most-played games on Xbox any time soon, although we’ll have to wait and see whether upcoming big releases like Elden Ring might have anything to say about that.
This was something I’d been asking people the last couple of weeks, as reports of Infinite’s struggling playerbase started to come out. In the True Achievement charts, the game has been doing great, even while it was dropping player count on steam. I’m not entirely sure how accurate their charts are, so if they’ve been found to be completely inaccurate, I’ll go ahead and delete this post.
Overall though, I do think that the recent reports were over-reliant on steam and twitch numbers. Halo Infinite certainly does need more work on the PC side especially, what with no in-game report feature and being unable to turn cross-play off. That being said, I did think it was weird everyone was ignoring the Xbox app on PC, where anyone who played the campaign through gamepass would have installed it.
And heck, don’t even get me started on using twitch numbers as any real metric of game playerbase.
