Halo Infinite Steam Player Count Doubles After Launch of Season 5

Halo Infinite is seeing a modest resurgence following the release of Season 5: Reckoning.

The first-person shooter from developer 343 Industries had hovered around the 7,000 concurrent player mark ahead of this week’s launch of Flood-based Season 5 on Valve’s platform. Halo Infinite then peaked at 18,000 concurrents on October 18, according to SteamDB. That’s the game’s highest peak since Season 2 launched about 17 months ago, and enough players for Halo Infinite to crack Steam’s top 50 most played games based on concurrent players.

It’s worth remembering that the only concrete player data we have comes from Steam. Microsoft does not release official Halo Infinite stats for all platforms. However, we do know that Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is currently in the top 50 most popular Xbox games, as confirmed by the Microsoft Store. Meanwhile, Halo Infinite has re-entered Steam’s list of top 100 best-selling games by revenue at number 24, suggesting that people are spending money on the new battle pass in the free-to-download multiplayer FPS.

That’s a modest increase that may increase as the weekend approaches, but Halo Infinite is still well below its all-time peak on Steam of 272,586 concurrent players, which was reached nearly two years ago when the game first came out .

Halo Infinite plummeted upon release as disgruntled players abandoned the game due to its poor progression systems, monetization, and lack of modes. 343 also made a number of controversial decisions, including eliminating split-screen multiplayer. Forge mode itself only appeared a year after release, along with online campaign co-op. 343 also seems to have left Halo Infinite’s campaign behind. In June, 343 announced that it had canceled Halo Infinite’s story-driven seasonal cutscenes, news that came after significant layoffs at the studio.

“As we refined our top priorities and shifted resources internally this year, we had to make the decision to forego seasonal narrative cutscenes to give the team space to continue to focus on highly requested features, content and improvements for Halo Infinite concentrate.” 343 said at the time.

The mention of “relocated resources” could refer to the layoffs affected Earlier this year and saw Halo Infinite director Joseph Staten leave the developer. 343 had to clarify that “Halo and Master Chief are here to stay.” Following the layoffs, the company said it will “continue to develop Halo now and in the future, including epic stories, multiplayer and more of what makes Halo great.”

The developer is reportedly working on a new Halo project, codenamed Tatanka, which is based on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine rather than its in-house Slipspace engine.

As the Halo community waits to hear what’s next for the franchise, sentiment towards Infinite has slowly turned, and players say it’s in a good place. Fans reacted positively to season 5 in particular.

The user-generated mode Forge received a major update as part of the season, adding a new AI toolkit to help players create more content, including PvPvE content. With Forge, players can now spawn specific AI from the campaign to complete their custom game creation, and the community is already having fun pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Wesley is the UK news editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.