Nearly twenty years ago, with undoubtedly a smaller (granted, still huge) budget and fewer devs, on a single console, when the idea of online console gaming was still relatively fresh, Halo 3 regularly had hundreds of thousands of players on simultaneously, if not over a million. And a lot of that population persisted for years afterward, with a small group of diehards continuing to play long after most moved on. It's the kind of game Bungie used to be able to make, the kind that would set the whole gaming world on fire and have a lasting legacy that persists two decades later.
Does Marathon need that many players to thrive as a game? Possibly not, I couldn't tell you what a healthy base would look like. But does Bungie need more players to make their ridiculous investment pay off? Definitely, they would kill to get even a fraction of what Halo 3 got on launch without even being a multiplatform title.
I dont think this is just the fault of Bungie, times have changed. I cant think of too many studios that have captured the sort of lighting in a bottle since.
There haven't been too many games or franchise that are a sort of social grease trap, where every one just sort of ends up, a sort of place people just default to. Best I can come up with is Fortnite, GTA V, Minecraft, and maybe COD.
Halo was the Xbox launch title, Most people had never played a game like Quake or Unreal, it was babies first arena shooter. It was the first game I've ever played with couch coop and I don't think I've done it since.
I think about how much more powerful an Xbox was at the time compared to previous consoles like the N64 or Playstation. It was like a whole new world for gaming.
Then came Halo 2, which introduced a whole new online frontier for millions of people. I had grown up playing games like Quake's online multiplayer for years and Halo 2 was the first game I ever played where I could shit talk another person with a microphone. I was hooked, this was a break through series.
These two games by themselves changed expectations of what a console game could be, 20 years later and nearly nothing lives up to this legacy. This is now, back then nothing came close to this baseline. No one had a choice, again, these games are just where people defaulted to.
Halo 3 introduced the edit mode, now creative types had an outlet, this game had a lot of room for many different types of players. It basically became a platform of its own.
Imagine a world with out bungie or halo, what would happen if out of no where in the year 2026 an indie studio releases Halo: Combat Evolved or some amalgamation of the three Halo titles. Would it be as popular now as it was back then? I don't think it would come close. I think people would laugh at you for suggesting a LAN party, despite 8v8 game nights being some of the best memories of my life.
Players are split across thousands of games, trends move faster, and people seemingly don't hang out to play video games together.
Were in a lonely skinner box gacha paypig world.
